Who Is Kimberly Powell? Nvidia Exec Alleged to Have Had Affair with Jensen Huang - Newsweek

Nvidia executive Kimberly Powell has been thrust into the spotlight after reports surfaced of an alleged affair between the vice president and Jensen Huang—the now-former CEO of the $4 trillion chipmaker.

Huang 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 Powell, 48, the vice president and general manager of healthcare and life sciences at Nvidia.

The New York Times—citing five anonymous individuals who had worked at the company—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 interaction was offered a nondisclosure agreement by Huang's security team. The Times says it has not obtained or viewed the video, and Newsweek could not confirm its existence or the other details reported by the newspaper.

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.

Powell's connection to Nvidia began early in her career in medical imaging.

According to her LinkedIn profile, after graduating from Northeastern University in 2001 with a degree in electrical engineering, Powell worked as a hardware engineer at DOME Imaging Systems and later held engineering and product management roles at Planar Systems. She also earned a graduate certificate in project management from Boston University in 2006 and completed an executive education program at MIT Sloan School of Management in 2007 before joining Nvidia in 2008.

Powell initially had little interest in pursuing engineering, despite her father's encouragement, she said in a wide-ranging interview last week on the DGTL Voices podcast with host Ed Marx. She said her path into technology and health care was shaped by a change of direction in college, an internship at a medical imaging company and an early encounter with physicians that helped define her career.

In the interview, Powell discussed her upbringing, family, education and career, offering a glimpse into the personal experiences that brought her to Nvidia.

"There is no straight line here," she said. "I had no idea exactly where I was going to go and how I was going to get here."

Powell was raised in Rhode Island with three older brothers. Her father was an engineer, while her mother, whom she described as hardworking, helped raise the family.

She remembered a relatively carefree childhood, riding bicycles around town and returning home after dark. Although she has since settled in California, Powell said she has found a neighborhood where her own children enjoy some of the same independence.

She said her attachment to the Northeast remains strong. Despite living in California for approximately 15 years, she said she still maintains a Boston-area telephone number and considers Logan International Airport her home airport.

"Boston still feels like home," she said. "So, I'm East Coast through and through."

Her father played a particularly influential role in her education, encouraging her interest in mathematics and science and even tutoring her at home during the summer before she entered high school.

Although she enjoyed those subjects, Powell initially resisted suggestions that she pursue engineering. When a high school physics teacher encouraged her to enter the field, she recalled responding, "Girls don't do engineering."

Instead, she enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston as an international business student, attracted by the prospect of traveling and pursuing a corporate career. But after taking introductory business courses, she began to feel that she was not fully using her abilities.

Students in her dorm encouraged her to try engineering classes, and she quickly discovered that she found the subject more engaging. She switched majors, eventually choosing electrical and computer engineering as personal computers and the internet were becoming increasingly prominent.

"I immediately felt more engaged," Powell said on the podcast. "And so, I made a turn, which most don't. I went from business to engineering."

Powell credited her father with steering her toward Northeastern, particularly because of its cooperative education program, which allowed students to alternate between academic study and professional employment.

She had initially hoped to attend college outside the Northeast, but her father believed the opportunity to gain practical experience alongside her studies would prove valuable.

That decision led Powell to a small medical imaging company involved in digitizing radiology. She said she spent much of her time working in laboratories, soldering circuit boards and programming equipment while learning from engineers.

When Powell graduated in 2001, the technology industry was struggling following the collapse of the dot-com bubble. But the company where she had interned offered her a full-time position, providing an early foothold in the industry.

She described those opportunities as pivotal, saying, "Without being there, I would have never met NVIDIA and NVIDIA would have never met me."

Her interest in health care developed more fully after she was invited to attend a demonstration involving radiologists from Massachusetts General Hospital. Until then, she said she had spent years working on medical imaging systems without fully appreciating their clinical applications.

Sitting alongside the physicians, Powell said she learned how technology could help them identify medical conditions and potentially make different diagnoses.

"I got bit by the health care bug in that moment," she told Marx.

She said the experience changed how she viewed her career. Rather than focusing exclusively on building technology, she became interested in developing products that could directly support medical professionals and improve patient care.

"If I'm going to work in technology, it's going to be for these humans who've dedicated their life to saving other people's lives," Powell said.

That realization also prompted her to move away from hands-on engineering and toward product development, where she could better understand customer needs and identify opportunities for new technologies.

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.

As Nvidia expanded its accelerated computing technology into new fields, including medical imaging and CT image reconstruction, the company recognized its potential in health care and approached Powell about helping develop those opportunities, drawing on her technical expertise and experience in medicine and product development.

"That honestly is the definition of a dream job," she told Marx. "It kind of combines everything, you know, understanding the technology, being very passionate about healthcare, thinking about products and how to build and develop them."

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.”

Powell's responsibilities have expanded alongside Nvidia's growing involvement in artificial intelligence, medical imaging, genomic analysis and drug discovery.

During the DGTL Voices podcast interview, she outlined her vision for how AI could transform hospitals, including through systems capable of completing administrative tasks and robots that could assist with physical work.

"You're going to see the hospital become a robot," she predicted, describing a future in which sensors, autonomous machines and AI systems work together to improve health care delivery.

She also argued that AI should increasingly be considered part of the health care workforce, helping medical professionals focus on tasks that require their expertise.

"AI is hirable. It has now become hirable," Powell said. "When I say it can actually do work, that means it can and should be considered part of the care team."

Both Huang and Powell are married. Public records indicate that Powell is married to a 54-year-old medical technology professional and inventor.

Powell also spoke about raising two teenage daughters and her interests outside work, including music, podcasts and spending time with family.

She said her musical preferences range from pop to jazz, with singer-songwriter Noah Kahan among her favorites. She said his music resonates with her East Coast upbringing and is a regular choice for family road trips.

"Noah is one of our favorites to listen to on road trips and things like that," she said. "He's back from the East Coast, you know, kind of sings about the way we grew up."

During the workweek, Powell said she listens to NPR podcasts and the All-In podcast to keep up with developments in technology and other subjects. At home, her daughters influence the family's listening habits, with pop music, including Olivia Dean, frequently playing.

She also enjoys jazz, particularly when relaxing at the end of the week.

"I also love to bring back jazz and just think about kicking back with a nice cocktail and reflecting on the week," Powell said.

At the time of the interview, Powell described herself as 47 and said she had increasingly embraced the philosophy of "YOLO," or "you only live once," an expression introduced to her by her sister-in-law.

Although often used casually, Powell said the sentiment had taken on a more serious meaning as she approached midlife.

"YOLO for me transcends personal life and it transcends work life and it transcends everything that I think we're trying to accomplish in health care," she said.

She also emphasized the importance of finding meaningful work and remaining committed to learning, describing her passion for healthcare as something that continues to motivate her professionally.

"If you can find that passion within you, you just sort of automatically wake up thinking about it," she said. "You don't have to force yourself to go learn. It just, the learning finds you."

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 show 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.

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, but these concerns intensified following the reports about Powell.

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 Thursday announcement came after the Wednesday board meeting. The company said it expected its operations, customer commitments and product road map to continue “without interruption.”

Unlike other tech giants that 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 a typical second-in-command layer, 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.

Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Daniel Orton and Geoffrey Rowland.mailto:name@newsweek.com