Nvidia Board Weighs Ousting CEO Jensen Huang, Report Says

Nvidia's board is reportedly meeting to decide whether to remove co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, after The New York Times reported allegations of a second extramarital relationship — this one inside the company's own executive ranks. Nvidia shares fell in after-hours trading following the news, according to media reports.

The details are specific, and they land hard on a company already in scandal.

Who is at the center of the new allegation?

The second relationship involves Kimberly Powell, according to The New York Times. Powell joined Nvidia in 2008 and currently heads the company's healthcare business — a unit that has become one of Nvidia's most visible bets beyond its core chip operations.

The Times report says Huang and Powell were seen being affectionate at a hotel during a company conference in March. The account gets more pointed from there: when a bystander took a photo of the interaction, a security guard "sequestered them" and offered them a nondisclosure agreement to sign, according to the report.

The NDA detail matters. It suggests, if the Times account holds, that the encounter drew a formal security response at the time — not just a private matter surfacing months later.

What came before this week?

This second allegation follows a separate and arguably more serious one. Last month, The Times reported that U.S. intelligence services believed a woman named Alice Huang — described as a former executive at a company identified as Megaspeed — may have acted as an intelligence asset and shared information with the ruling party in Beijing.

That earlier report described an alleged relationship between Jensen Huang and a woman whom U.S. intelligence reportedly suspected of ties to Chinese intelligence. It was that first report that embroiled Nvidia in scandal this week.

On Sunday, Jensen Huang issued a statement apologizing to his family and to Nvidia employees for having an affair. He did not name the person involved in the statement.

In response to the reporting, Nvidia's board said it is launching an independent investigation into the matter.

Where things stand now

Taken together, the reports have intensified scrutiny of Huang's leadership and raised questions about how Nvidia's board will respond. The key open items:

• The board is said to be meeting to decide whether Huang should be ousted as chief executive, according to media reports.
• An independent investigation, announced by the board, is underway.
• Shares reportedly fell in after-hours trading after the latest report.
• Huang's Sunday apology did not identify the person involved, and he has not directly addressed the board's deliberations in the statements described.

Important caveat: the allegations remain attributed to press reports, chiefly The New York Times, and have not been independently confirmed in the material available for this story. Nvidia has not, in the reporting described here, confirmed the details of either alleged relationship.

Why the stakes are unusually high

Two features separate this from a routine corporate conduct story.

First, the alleged second relationship involves a sitting Nvidia executive who runs a major business unit. Powell has led the healthcare business since joining the leadership ranks after arriving in 2008, per the Times. A leadership shakeup triggered by this report would not touch the CEO alone.

Second, the first alleged relationship carries a national-security dimension. The claim that U.S. intelligence services believed Alice Huang may have passed information to Beijing's ruling party turns a personal scandal into a potential compromise question — one an independent board investigation is presumably structured to examine.

Huang co-founded Nvidia and has run it for essentially its entire life as a public company, making him one of the most consequential and closely identified CEOs in the technology industry. Any board move against him would be unprecedented in the company's history.

The near-term question is procedural: what the independent investigation finds, and whether the board acts on it before the inquiry concludes. Until then, the market signal is already moving — after-hours trading reportedly turned negative on the news.