Nvidia Board Moves to Oust Jensen Huang Over Second Affair

Nvidia's board is preparing to oust co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang following allegations of a second extramarital affair — this one with a company executive who reports directly to him, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The 63-year-old, who has led the chipmaker for more than three decades, could see his tenure end after a board meeting scheduled as early as Wednesday to determine his future, according to the Journal.

The latest allegation reportedly involves Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare. It lands just days after reports of Huang's liaison with a woman who led Singaporean data center firm Megaspeed — a woman also suspected of being a Chinese spy. Nvidia's board launched an investigation after Huang acknowledged that first affair, but the company said it has no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised.

Why the second affair may matter more than the first

Here's the irony: the first affair carries the bigger geopolitical stakes, but the second may seal Huang's fate. Megaspeed is an Nvidia customer that the Commerce Department previously investigated over possible chip diversions to China. Lawmakers have already taken notice, and three House committee chairs have requested a closed-door meeting with Huang.

"This is not just personal foibles," a senior government official who focuses on AI told Fast Company earlier this week.

The subordinate relationship raises a different problem — corporate governance and potential legal exposure for Nvidia itself. Huang now also faces a proposed shareholder class action over the scandal. What does this change for practitioners? A national security story has morphed into a governance crisis, and that broadens the liability surface from Huang personally to the company and its board.

From gaming chips to a $96 billion quarter

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, after stints at AMD and LSI Logic. Their bet — that increasingly sophisticated graphics would demand specialized processors — paid off. In 1999, six years after launch, Nvidia shipped the GeForce 256, marketed as the world's first GPU, and kicked gaming into hyperdrive.

The most consequential wager came in 2006, when Nvidia introduced CUDA, a software platform letting programmers use GPUs for tasks beyond graphics. In 2012, researchers used Nvidia GPUs to train AlexNet, the breakthrough neural network that ushered in modern deep learning. A decade later, ChatGPT sent demand soaring, and Nvidia was ready with both chips and the software ecosystem around them. "We are at the iPhone moment of AI," Huang declared in March 2023.

The results: Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter — more than double the prior year — with $89 billion of that from the data center business alone. Its chips are essential infrastructure for Microsoft, Google and leading AI labs.

What a company built around one man looks like now

Huang runs an unusually flat operation: roughly 60 direct reports, no chief operating officer, and no publicly identified successor, Fortune reports. Huang has reportedly said he doesn't believe in succession planning. That structure helped him stay deeply involved — he famously favored group discussions over one-on-one meetings — but it now leaves no obvious heir to a multitrillion-dollar company.

The market is already pricing the risk. Nvidia shares fell roughly 8% in after-hours trading Wednesday on the reports. The timing compounds the pressure: Anthropic is reportedly preparing to go public as soon as next week, amid growing investor anxiety over the sums pouring into AI.

For 33 years, Nvidia's fortunes have been inseparable from Huang's. Now, with much of the tech industry tied to Nvidia's chips, the company may have to prove — quickly, and under legal and congressional scrutiny — that it can thrive without him.