Another of Jensen Huang’s affair partners—what gives her the power to shake up the board?
The question of whether NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang should stay or go is already on the boardroom table.
According to people familiar with the matter cited by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, the board could meet as soon as Wednesday local time to discuss whether Huang should remain CEO, with “removal” among the options.
Just three days ago, Huang sent an apology to all employees, admitting that he had been unfaithful to his wife. At the time, the board had said it was “confident” in him and his leadership team. But the final straw for the board’s patience was the revelation of a second extramarital affair—this time not with an outside business partner, but with NVIDIA’s vice president of healthcare and life sciences, who reported directly to him: Kimberly Powell.
The leader of NVIDIA’s healthcare business
Now 48, Kimberly Powell began her career on the standard hardware-engineering track.
She graduated from Northeastern University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering. Early in her career, she joined professional display equipment manufacturer Planar Systems as a hardware engineer, where she was responsible for FPGA design. She later moved into product marketing management and spent years specializing in medical imaging displays. This experience gave her a thorough understanding of the entire medical hardware pipeline, from research and development to commercialization, and helped her build valuable industry connections before she later moved into GPU applications in healthcare.
When Powell joined NVIDIA in 2008, GPU applications in healthcare were almost nonexistent. At the time, NVIDIA was still known as a gaming graphics card company, with its pixels used mainly to render game characters and scenes. Meanwhile, MRI and ultrasound equipment in hospitals belonged to a slow-moving, tightly regulated, closed-off world. Powell’s task was to break through the divide between the two.
She later recalled that NVIDIA’s first healthcare application was essentially still “graphics”—except that the subjects on screen had changed from game characters to tissues and organs inside the human body. To spot subtle lesions, radiologists needed massive parallel computing power for 3D MRI imaging. GPUs, which excel at processing millions of pixels simultaneously, provided NVIDIA with its first opening into the healthcare industry.
As NVIDIA expanded further into medical imaging, and the artificial intelligence boom took off, Powell’s responsibilities and authority continued to grow:
2016: Powell was promoted to senior director of AI business development. In addition to focusing on healthcare, she took charge of university research partnerships, the global rollout of NVIDIA AI Labs, and the Inception startup accelerator program.
Late 2017: Powell was officially promoted to vice president of healthcare, becoming NVIDIA’s most senior executive in the healthcare business and reporting directly to Jensen Huang.
According to NVIDIA’s website, her responsibilities include providing hardware and software platforms for accelerated computing, AI, and visualization across the medical imaging, life sciences, drug discovery, and healthcare analytics ecosystems. After taking up the role, she led the development of NVIDIA Clara, a full-stack medical AI platform, creating a complete product portfolio spanning medical imaging, genomics, drug discovery, and surgical robotics.
Her fingerprints are on nearly every one of NVIDIA’s core product lines in medical AI. Powell has consequently become a prominent figure in the global medical AI industry. She has delivered keynote speeches for years at major industry events, including the GTC developer conference, the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, and the BIO International Convention. She is also NVIDIA’s primary public spokesperson for its healthcare business. At the GTC conference in March 2026, she even used a cartoon image of Jensen Huang in her presentation slides. No one in the audience could have imagined then that it would become the focus of public attention months later.
The scandal had been circulating inside NVIDIA for some time
The complicated relationship between the executive and her subordinate had long been an open secret in inner circles at NVIDIA. It took allegations from five former employees, uncovered by The New York Times, to bring the rumor fully into the open.
The most concrete account came from two people familiar with the matter, who told The New York Times:
During the GTC conference in San Jose in March 2026, witnesses photographed Huang and Powell behaving intimately at a hotel near the venue. Someone recorded a video on their phone. Huang’s security team then intervened, took the witness aside, and asked them to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
These claims have not been confirmed by Huang, Powell, or NVIDIA. The video has never surfaced, and it is also unknown whether the nondisclosure agreement was ultimately signed. Like many of NVIDIA’s undisclosed power decisions, the matter has remained out of public view. After the report came out, a reporter called Huang directly for comment. He replied, “I don’t think you should be talking to me directly about this,” and then hung up. As of publication, neither Powell nor NVIDIA has directly responded to the allegations.
Compared with the previously reported incident involving Le Huang, Powell’s position makes the compliance risks in this case entirely different. Le Huang was an outside business partner, whereas Powell is a senior NVIDIA executive who reports directly to Huang. The clear reporting relationship between them directly crosses a fundamental red line in corporate governance.
NVIDIA’s publicly available employee code of conduct explicitly states that employees must avoid any situation that could give rise to a conflict of interest. An undisclosed intimate relationship between a manager and a direct report is a classic conflict-of-interest scenario: given the power imbalance, the fairness of every decision involving compensation, promotions, and resource allocation is called into question.
The board reverses course as the AI godfather stands on the brink
As the scandal continued to unfold, NVIDIA shares fell more than 9% in after-hours trading following the news, briefly wiping out more than $100 billion in market value.
The board, which had previously said it was “confident in the management team,” rapidly reversed course. According to Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, the board has now contacted outside firms to identify potential successors and has even begun considering appointing an interim CEO. It could meet as soon as Wednesday local time to formally discuss whether Huang should stay or go.
The AI godfather who single-handedly propelled NVIDIA to a trillion-dollar valuation now stands on the brink of his career.
The question of whether NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang should stay or go is already on the boardroom table.
According to people familiar with the matter cited by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, the board could meet as soon as Wednesday local time to discuss whether Huang should remain CEO, with “removal” among the options.
Just three days ago, Huang sent an apology to all employees, admitting that he had been unfaithful to his wife. At the time, the board had said it was “confident” in him and his leadership team. But the final straw for the board’s patience was the revelation of a second extramarital affair—this time not with an outside business partner, but with NVIDIA’s vice president of healthcare and life sciences, who reported directly to him: Kimberly Powell.
The leader of NVIDIA’s healthcare business
Now 48, Kimberly Powell began her career on the standard hardware-engineering track.
She graduated from Northeastern University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering. Early in her career, she joined professional display equipment manufacturer Planar Systems as a hardware engineer, where she was responsible for FPGA design. She later moved into product marketing management and spent years specializing in medical imaging displays. This experience gave her a thorough understanding of the entire medical hardware pipeline, from research and development to commercialization, and helped her build valuable industry connections before she later moved into GPU applications in healthcare.
When Powell joined NVIDIA in 2008, GPU applications in healthcare were almost nonexistent. At the time, NVIDIA was still known as a gaming graphics card company, with its pixels used mainly to render game characters and scenes. Meanwhile, MRI and ultrasound equipment in hospitals belonged to a slow-moving, tightly regulated, closed-off world. Powell’s task was to break through the divide between the two.
She later recalled that NVIDIA’s first healthcare application was essentially still “graphics”—except that the subjects on screen had changed from game characters to tissues and organs inside the human body. To spot subtle lesions, radiologists needed massive parallel computing power for 3D MRI imaging. GPUs, which excel at processing millions of pixels simultaneously, provided NVIDIA with its first opening into the healthcare industry.
As NVIDIA expanded further into medical imaging, and the artificial intelligence boom took off, Powell’s responsibilities and authority continued to grow:
2016: Powell was promoted to senior director of AI business development. In addition to focusing on healthcare, she took charge of university research partnerships, the global rollout of NVIDIA AI Labs, and the Inception startup accelerator program.
Late 2017: Powell was officially promoted to vice president of healthcare, becoming NVIDIA’s most senior executive in the healthcare business and reporting directly to Jensen Huang.
According to NVIDIA’s website, her responsibilities include providing hardware and software platforms for accelerated computing, AI, and visualization across the medical imaging, life sciences, drug discovery, and healthcare analytics ecosystems. After taking up the role, she led the development of NVIDIA Clara, a full-stack medical AI platform, creating a complete product portfolio spanning medical imaging, genomics, drug discovery, and surgical robotics.
Her fingerprints are on nearly every one of NVIDIA’s core product lines in medical AI. Powell has consequently become a prominent figure in the global medical AI industry. She has delivered keynote speeches for years at major industry events, including the GTC developer conference, the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, and the BIO International Convention. She is also NVIDIA’s primary public spokesperson for its healthcare business. At the GTC conference in March 2026, she even used a cartoon image of Jensen Huang in her presentation slides. No one in the audience could have imagined then that it would become the focus of public attention months later.
The scandal had been circulating inside NVIDIA for some time
The complicated relationship between the executive and her subordinate had long been an open secret in inner circles at NVIDIA. It took allegations from five former employees, uncovered by The New York Times, to bring the rumor fully into the open.
The most concrete account came from two people familiar with the matter, who told The New York Times:
During the GTC conference in San Jose in March 2026, witnesses photographed Huang and Powell behaving intimately at a hotel near the venue. Someone recorded a video on their phone. Huang’s security team then intervened, took the witness aside, and asked them to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
These claims have not been confirmed by Huang, Powell, or NVIDIA. The video has never surfaced, and it is also unknown whether the nondisclosure agreement was ultimately signed. Like many of NVIDIA’s undisclosed power decisions, the matter has remained out of public view. After the report came out, a reporter called Huang directly for comment. He replied, “I don’t think you should be talking to me directly about this,” and then hung up. As of publication, neither Powell nor NVIDIA has directly responded to the allegations.
Compared with the previously reported incident involving Le Huang, Powell’s position makes the compliance risks in this case entirely different. Le Huang was an outside business partner, whereas Powell is a senior NVIDIA executive who reports directly to Huang. The clear reporting relationship between them directly crosses a fundamental red line in corporate governance.
NVIDIA’s publicly available employee code of conduct explicitly states that employees must avoid any situation that could give rise to a conflict of interest. An undisclosed intimate relationship between a manager and a direct report is a classic conflict-of-interest scenario: given the power imbalance, the fairness of every decision involving compensation, promotions, and resource allocation is called into question.
The board reverses course as the AI godfather stands on the brink
As the scandal continued to unfold, NVIDIA shares fell more than 9% in after-hours trading following the news, briefly wiping out more than $100 billion in market value.
The board, which had previously said it was “confident in the management team,” rapidly reversed course. According to Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, the board has now contacted outside firms to identify potential successors and has even begun considering appointing an interim CEO. It could meet as soon as Wednesday local time to formally discuss whether Huang should stay or go.
The AI godfather who single-handedly propelled NVIDIA to a trillion-dollar valuation now stands on the brink of his career.