Another extramarital affair of Jensen Huang has been exposed, and the board of directors may meet as soon as today to vote on his removal.

The New York Times reported in the early hours of November 12 that Nvidia's Jensen Huang is involved in another extramarital affair, with Kimberly Powell, 48, vice president of Nvidia's healthcare business, who reports directly to Huang; both are married.

The sources are five former Nvidia employees, all of whom requested anonymity. They said the relationship had never been publicly reported before, but it had long been discussed inside the company. Two of them said that during the GTC conference in San Jose in March this year, the two were photographed behaving intimately at a nearby hotel; the other three said that passersby used their phones to capture the scene at the time, and Huang's security personnel led the photographer away and offered to have the person sign a nondisclosure agreement.

CNBC additionally cited a former employee as saying that the rumor had circulated within the company for years, partly because Powell "lacks a healthcare or scientific background."

Responses from the individuals and the company

When asked by a New York Times reporter by phone, Huang only replied, "I don't think you should talk to me directly about this," and hung up, neither confirming nor denying it. In his letter on November 8, he only acknowledged "infidelity to his wife" and did not name anyone.

The only confirmed follow-up action so far is this: Powell had been scheduled to speak at the opening of the Milken Institute health summit in Washington on the morning of November 12, and host Meg Tirrell, a CNN reporter, confirmed that she had canceled her appearance, without giving a reason.

Removal progress

The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said the board is preparing to remove Huang, possibly meeting as soon as that day. A Bloomberg reporter said the board is looking for an outside headhunter to identify a successor and is considering appointing an interim CEO first.

The succession issue has been magnified because Huang has about 60 direct reports, and the company has no public succession plan. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson believes that without a ready-made succession arrangement, it would be difficult to replace him immediately; Jay Goldberg of Seaport believes that if company policy was indeed violated, it would be difficult for Huang to remain, but orders are already booked into next year, and the business itself will not be directly affected. As for "who would take over temporarily," previously only outside experts had speculated about CFO Colette Kress or lead independent director Stephen Neal; that was only speculation, not a company arrangement.

Who is Powell

She graduated from Northeastern University with a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering. Before joining Nvidia, she worked at Planar Systems as a hardware engineer and in product management for medical diagnostic displays, and participated in a workstation project at Massachusetts General Hospital.

She joined Nvidia in 2008, initially responsible for driving the use of GPUs in medical imaging devices, later managing university and research business, as well as the startup support program Inception. In 2016, she was promoted to Senior Director of AI Business Development, and from October 2017, she served as Vice President of Healthcare, reporting directly to Jensen Huang. Her responsibilities included the medical AI platform Clara, the drug discovery model BioNeMo, the medical imaging AI platform MONAI, and the genomics acceleration tool Parabricks; publicly, this business is said to be in the $1 billion range, and CNBC says it is only a small business for Nvidia. This year, Nvidia's $1 billion AI joint laboratory with Eli Lilly and Roche's deployment of more than 3,500 GPUs both belong to this business.

The market reaction was significant, and Nvidia plunged in after-hours trading. In prediction markets, the probability on Polymarket of "Jensen Huang announcing resignation or being removed before the end of the year" was about 90%, while on November 9 this figure was still only around 16%.

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