Nvidia founder Jensen Huang resigned as CEO Thursday, one day after a report surfaced that he had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the AI chipmaker’s vice president of healthcare.
Powell, 48, reported directly to 63-year-old Huang. A New York Times report on Wednesday that cited five company sources said that the duo was “captured on video being affectionate” at an Nvidia conference hotel in San Jose in March, and that Powell is also married.
Huang’s ousting came as he was under investigation at Nvidia over whether he was the target of a “foreign intelligence effort” unrelated to Powell. The Times had reported last month that US officials believed another woman he grew close with, tech executive Alice Huang, had been recruited by the Chinese government to spy on the chip giant. Huang admitted to being “unfaithful” to his wife in a note to staff on Sunday, setting off a tumultuous week for the Nvidia founder.
Here’s what to know about Powell.
Powell steered Nvidia’s healthcare efforts
Powell joined Nvidia as a director in 2008 and has steadily risen through the ranks. According to her corporate profile, she was originally responsible for promoting the use of Nvidia’s AI chips for medical imaging.
She’d previously worked as an engineer and then in product at an electronics startup and ended up getting ahold of Nvidia to talk about their computing chips. Once the company realized its technology would have healthcare applications, it got back in touch to hire her, she said on an episode of the Lifers podcast published this August.
Powell called the job a “dream come true” on the podcast.
Her LinkedIn says she was promoted to senior director in 2016, and she led a business development team focused on AI. Powell’s authority was growing — in 2017, she became vice president of healthcare, her profile says.
Her corporate profile now says she is responsible for both the hardware and software sides of the company’s healthcare business, including 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.
Kimberly Powell’s ties to Jensen Huang
Until Thursday, Huang — one of the entire tech industry’s best-known representatives — had run Nvidia since he founded the company in 1993. He and Powell had worked together for more than 18 years.
In the August interview with Lifers, Powell 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.
Nvidia’s code of conduct, which begins with a letter from Huang, includes personal relationships among the activities that can create a conflict of interest.
It also says, “We promptly investigate reports of misconduct.”
Neither Powell nor Nvidia responded to requests for comment from Business Insider.
CNN reporter Meg Tirrell posted on X that she’d been planning to moderate a conference panel featuring Powell on Thursday morning, but that Powell had canceled.
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