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By Hugh Cameron
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A reported affair involving Jensen Huang—the now former CEO of Nvidia—and an executive at the $4 trillion chipmaker has thrown her into the spotlight.
Huang has now resigned as Nvidia’s president and chief executive and stepped down from its board on Thursday, bringing his 33-year leadership of the company to an abrupt end. Nvidia said the resignation was effective immediately but did not give a reason for his departure.
The Nvidia boss was already staring down a federal probe and internal investigation following news of an extramarital relationship with a Chinese business executive and alleged intelligence operative for Beijing. And Huang’s future at the company which he co-founded in 1993 was brought further into question after reports of a second affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare.
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Citing five anonymous individuals who had worked at the company, The New York Times reported that Huang and Powell were filmed being affectionate toward each other at a San Jose hotel during Nvidia's developer conference in March, and that a bystander who recorded this was offered a nondisclosure agreement by Huang's security team. The Times states that it has not obtained or viewed the video, and Newsweek could not confirm its existence or the other details reported by the newspaper.
Nvidia has appointed its chief financial officer, Colette Kress, as interim CEO while its board searches for a permanent successor. Kress, who has been the company’s CFO since 2013, will retain her existing responsibilities during the search, which will consider internal and external candidates. The board also appointed longtime director and former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones as Nvidia’s first chair.
The announcement came after Nvidia’s board met Wednesday to consider Huang’s future amid the reports concerning Powell. The company said it expected its operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue “without interruption.”
Newsweek has reached out to Powell through her company email outside of regular working hours for comment, and will update this article if a response is received. Newsweek has also contacted Nvidia for comment.
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Who Is Kimberly Powell?
According to her Nvidia page and profile on LinkedIn, Powell, 48, currently serves as Vice President and General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Nvidia.
According to her LinkedIn, Powell graduated from Northeastern University in 2001 with a degree, having studied electrical engineering with a concentration in computer engineering. She later achieved a graduate certificate in project management from Boston University in 2006 and attended an executive education program at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2007.
In an interview with Politico in March, Powell said the book which had most shaped her “conception of the future” was The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The book chronicles the history of cancer and is presented as a biography of the disease—tracing early efforts at understanding to modern day therapies.
She joined the company in 2008, first as a director of worldwide business development, higher education and healthcare, before progressing to senior director of AI business developing and into her current role—which she has held since 2017.
She now reports directly to the CEO and oversees, according to Nvidia, “the company’s worldwide healthcare business, including hardware and software platforms for accelerated computing, AI, and visualization that power the ecosystem of medical imaging, life sciences, drug discovery, and healthcare analytics.”
Both Huang and Powell are married. Public records indicate that Powell is married to a 54-year-old medical technology professional and inventor.
The Nvidia employee code of conduct urges employees to avoid “situations where our actions might create a conflict—actual or potential—between our personal gain and our obligations to Nvidia.” These include “investments or business relationships.”
Available records and reporting shows Powell and Huang have maintained a lengthy professional association marked by simultaneous conference appearances and public statements. Powell featured cartoon images of Huang during her presentation at Nvidia’s AI conference in March in San Jose.
Both have several times appeared on the same conference schedules or visited the same cities simultaneously, including Taipei in June 2024, San Jose in March 2025 and March 2026, and Berlin in October 2026.
During a podcast appearance in August, Powell called Jensen Huang “passionate about the heath care industry.”
According to The New York Times, sources at the company said the relationship between Huang and Powell was known to certain employees, but there remain several unanswered questions regarding the length of the alleged affair. The Times also stated explicitly that it had not seen the alleged footage of the pair together at a San Jose hotel in March.
However, Powell has withdrawn from a planned appearance following this week’s reports. She was scheduled to speak on a panel at the Milken Institute's Future of Health Summit in Washington, D.C., but the event’s webpage no longer lists her as a participant.
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Huang Resigns After Affair Reports
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s board would be meeting to discuss Jensen Huang’s future at the company.
His alleged affair with Alice Huang—a Chinese business executive of no relation—had already sparked public discussion on the topic, but these concerns intensified following on from the Powell reports.
Unlike other tech giants which deliberately anoint heirs-apparent—such as Apple with Tim Cook—Nvidia has long been viewed as having a uniquely centralized structure constructed around its CEO to whom there is no obvious successor. Dozens of executives report directly to Huang, bypassing the typical second-in-command layer of the company, and this has been seen as insulating his position somewhat in light of the recent scandals.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Nvidia warned that the company remains “highly dependent on the services of our longstanding executive team” and said that the “failure to ensure effective succession planning, transfer of knowledge, and smooth transitions involving executives and key employees could hinder our strategic planning, execution, and long-term success.”
“There is no apparent successor as he has seemingly deliberately refused to create any Number two at Nvidia,” said John C. Coffee Jr, a Columbia Law School professor and corporate governance expert.
“This is an extraordinary flat organization with no intermediate senior executives, and the collapse of Nvidia could produce unpredictable damage to the stock market,” he told Newsweek.
“The fundamentals of the company remain strong, but were Huang to be forced out as CEO, it would be challenging to find someone with his breadth of knowledge of the industry and close personal relationships with the leaders of key suppliers and customers,” Paul Triolo, Technology Policy Lead for Asia and the Americas at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, told Newsweek.
Both experts spoke with Newsweek prior to the latest developments involving Powell and Huang's resignation.
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