Nvidia Healthcare VP Kimberly Powell Named in Huang Report

Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's 48-year-old vice president of healthcare, had an intimate relationship with CEO Jensen Huang, according to a New York Times report on Wednesday that cited five company sources. Powell reports directly to Huang, who is 63, and she is also married, the Times reported.

The report adds a new name to a scandal that has already reached Nvidia's boardroom. The Times said the two were "captured on video being affectionate" at an Nvidia conference hotel in San Jose in March. Huang, meanwhile, is already under investigation at Nvidia over whether he was the target of a "foreign intelligence effort." US officials reportedly believed tech executive Alice Huang — another woman the CEO grew close to — may have been recruited by the Chinese government to spy on the chip giant.

Huang admitted to being "unfaithful" to his wife in a memo to staff on Sunday. Powell's emergence as the second woman in the story raises a direct governance question: her role puts her in the reporting line of the man writing Nvidia's conduct rules.

Who is Kimberly Powell?

Powell joined Nvidia as a director in 2008, hired originally to promote the use of Nvidia's AI chips for medical imaging, according to her corporate profile. Before that, she worked as an engineer and then in product at an electronics startup. She contacted Nvidia about its computing chips; once the company realized its technology had healthcare applications, it recruited her, she said on an episode of the Lifers podcast published this August.

She called the job a "dream come true" on the podcast.

The climb was steady. Her LinkedIn shows a promotion to senior director in 2016, where she led a business development team focused on AI. In 2017, she became vice president of healthcare. Her corporate profile now puts her in charge of both the hardware and software sides of Nvidia's healthcare business — technology for medical imaging, life sciences, and drug discovery.

"I pretty much live and breathe healthcare. So I'm talking about it all the time," Powell told Business Insider in 2025.

How close are Powell and Huang?

Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and has led it ever since, meaning he and Powell have worked together for over 18 years. On the Lifers podcast in August, Powell publicly credited Huang's healthcare ambitions.

"Jensen has been passionate about the healthcare industry going back 20-plus years, and that was really fueled by seeing just researchers who had dreams and aspirations to do something very, very meaningful and impactful in the healthcare domain and us potentially having the tools to do it, to achieve that goal," she said.

The relationship now collides with company policy. Nvidia's code of conduct, which opens with a letter from Huang himself, lists personal relationships among the activities that can create a conflict of interest. It also states: "We promptly investigate reports of misconduct."

Neither Powell nor Nvidia responded to requests for comment from Business Insider.

What happens next?

Two threads now run in parallel: an internal probe into a possible foreign intelligence effort targeting the CEO, and a conduct code that names exactly the kind of relationship Powell and Huang reportedly had. How Nvidia's leadership applies its own rules to its founder will say as much about the company's governance as the investigation itself.