Jensen Huang’s future at Nvidia hangs in the balance as the board is reportedly preparing to oust the CEO, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. The move follows two extramarital affairs by Huang, one of them with a suspected Chinese spy and another one reportedly with Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president of health care, according to The New York Times.
Huang admitted in a company memo made public on Nov. 8 to extramarital actions: “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.” Lori has not commented publicly on the memo.
Huang’s position has raised questions about Nvidia’s future, including who would take the reins in his absence, given that he’s the face of the $4 trillion chipmaking giant. But in the family’s philanthropy, his wife, Lori Huang, holds the top title.
Lori is president of the Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation, which reported about $9.2 billion in assets at the end of 2024, according to its most recent tax filing reviewed by Fortune. Jensen is listed as the foundation’s secretary and CFO, and Lori has held the president title on every filing available dating back to 2014.
Her role also extends to most of the Huangs’ Nvidia shares. As of March 23, Lori and Jensen were co-trustees of three family trusts holding nearly 669 million Nvidia shares, according to Nvidia’s latest proxy statement reviewed by Fortune. That’s most of the 870.6 million shares (worth roughly $151 billion as of late Nov. 11) the proxy reports as beneficially owned by Jensen, a figure that also includes the foundation’s stock.
The proxy also says that as board members of the foundation since 2007, the couple may be deemed to share voting and investment power over its 58.7 million Nvidia shares, though neither has a financial interest in them.
Nvidia’s board said Nov. 8 it was investigating reports Jensen had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, but said it “has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised.” The independent directors later hired former acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim and his firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to run the probe. China’s foreign ministry has called the spying allegations groundless.
Lori Huang’s role in the foundation
Lori, born Lori Mills, met Jensen when the two were paired as lab partners in an electrical fundamentals class at Oregon State University, where she graduated in 1985. He was 17 and she was 19. They married in 1985, and a few years later she left the workforce to raise their two children. Both children, Madison and Spencer, now work at Nvidia. Jensen said in an interview with Singapore-based media outlet CNA that “every moment of Nvidia, she was there.”
The foundation’s growth has tracked the Huangs’ gifts of Nvidia stock and the company’s rise. Its net assets climbed from about $819 million at the end of 2020 to more than $9.1 billion at the end of 2024, and about $8.6 billion of its holdings that year were in stocks, according to its tax filings. In 2024 alone, it gained about $5 billion in paper gains. Nvidia’s proxy shows the foundation held 58.7 million Nvidia shares as of March.
In June and September 2024, Jensen and Lori, as co-trustees of their living trust, gave the foundation a combined 1.3 million Nvidia shares, according to Jensen’s Form 4 filings and the foundation’s tax return. The foundation valued those gifts at about $160 million. In September, the trust also gave 688,000 shares to an unnamed donor-advised fund.
The foundation reported paying no salaries in 2024. Its only listed officers, Lori and Jensen, each report working one hour a week, unpaid, and its paid outside help consisted of an investment manager and an accounting firm.
In 2024, the foundation paid out about $126.3 million in grants. More than $82 million went to Schwab Charitable Fund, which sponsors donor-advised funds, and the filing notes the foundation gave to a donor-advised fund over which it or an insider had advisory privileges. Other 2024 recipients included Oregon State, which received about $30.5 million, and Crisis Text Line, which received about $10.8 million.
The filing also shows the foundation was required to distribute roughly $344.6 million in 2025 under federal payout rules. Its 2025 return, which would show whether it met that requirement, hasn’t been made public. Some public announcements from 2025 show the foundation matched $22.5 million in donations to the California College of the Arts, and in November, the Huangs announced a multi-year commitment of $5 million a year to San Francisco Opera.
This year, the foundation bought about $108.3 million worth of computing capacity from CoreWeave to donate to universities and nonprofit research institutes, a filing Reuters reviewed shows. Also in 2026, Vanderbilt University announced a $75 million matching gift from the Huangs for its art, architecture, and design San Francisco campus.
Nvidia and the foundation did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
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