Who Is Kimberly Powell, the Nvidia Executive Named in the New Jensen Huang Report?

Kimberly Powell is Nvidia's vice president of healthcare — the executive who has run the chipmaker's worldwide healthcare business since 2017 and who joined the company in 2008. She is in the news because The New York Times reported on Wednesday that she had an extramarital relationship with Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, to whom she reports directly. That report is not confirmed: neither Powell, nor Huang, nor Nvidia has confirmed it, and Reuters said it could not immediately verify it.

The plain reality is that Powell was not a public figure until this week. She is a career executive who spent nearly two decades building one corner of Nvidia — its push into medical imaging, drug discovery and healthcare AI — and the document the story rests on is a newspaper report citing five unnamed people who worked at the company, describing the two being affectionate at a San Jose hotel during Nvidia's GTC conference in March. The Times says a bystander filmed the encounter, that Huang's security team took the person aside and offered a nondisclosure agreement — and that the newspaper has not viewed the video itself. No investigation has made a finding about Powell, and no formal process has tested the claim.

What the people in the story claim is mostly silence. Nvidia declined to issue a statement to the Times. Powell did not respond to requests for comment from the Times, CNBC or Reuters. Huang, reached by phone and asked about Powell, gave the only words anyone in the company has given: "I don't think you should be talking to me directly." Then he hung up.

The common-sense principle is the one Nvidia's own rules state. The company's code of conduct tells employees to avoid personal relationships that create conflicts of interest, and like most large companies it discourages relationships between a superior and someone who reports to them — because when one person in a relationship controls the other's career, the relationship is never only private. It becomes a question about the fairness of every decision around both of them.

You can't have a relationship like this with a direct report. — Peter Jaworski, business ethics professor at Georgetown University

The consequence landed within hours, and it landed on a question much bigger than Powell herself. On Wednesday evening the Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia's board was preparing to oust Huang — the man who co-founded the company in 1993 — and the board met late into Wednesday night to decide his future, as our report on the board's move sets out. Nvidia's shares, which had closed Wednesday at $173.73, fell about 7 percent in after-hours trading, and the company has lost roughly $600 billion in value this week. An analyst at D.A. Davidson told Reuters that removing Huang immediately "could be challenging for Nvidia since it does not have a succession plan in place." So an unconfirmed report about a healthcare executive now sits inside the decision about who runs the most valuable chip company in the world — and if the claim itself is never tested by anyone, who is left to judge it: the sources, or the proof?

The details that matter about Powell are these. She is 48 and, according to the Times, married, as is Huang, who is 63. She came to Nvidia in 2008 to establish its graphics processors as the standard platform for medical imaging instruments, after starting her career in engineering and product management for diagnostic display systems at Planar Systems; she holds an electrical engineering degree from Northeastern University. Before healthcare she led Nvidia's higher education and research business, its AI Labs and its Inception programme for AI start-ups, became a senior director in 2016 and took the healthcare vice presidency in 2017. The platforms under her unit include BioNeMo for AI-driven biology and drug discovery, MONAI for medical imaging and Parabricks for genomics — she was still presenting that work publicly this year, walking the BIO2026 show floor for Nvidia in June. Her case must not be mixed up with the other woman in this story: Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore data company Megaspeed, is of no relation to Jensen Huang and is the woman U.S. intelligence officials suspect of working for China's spy services. It was that relationship — the one Huang admitted to staff on Sunday, saying he had been unfaithful to his wife, without naming anyone — that the board is already investigating through the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, while saying it has no reason to believe national security or Nvidia's secrets were compromised. The Powell report is a second, separate and unconfirmed claim, and it matters for a different reason: the first is about a suspected spy, the second is about the company's own rules. Nvidia reports its quarterly results on November 17, and until the board speaks, the Powell allegations remain exactly what they are — reporting, not findings.

Powell herself has said nothing in public. The only voice from inside the company on the question remains Huang's, and it was one short sentence: "I don't think you should be talking to me directly."