- Kimberly Powell withdrew from the Milken Health Summit panel without explanation
- The New York Times reported Powell had an extramarital affair with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
- Nvidia’s board reportedly considered removing Huang amid related controversies
Kimberly Powell was supposed to take the stage in Washington on Thursday morning. The opening panel at the Milken Institute's Future of Health Summit was called “Engineering the Next Era of Human Health.”
It was the sort of room Nvidia sent Powell into to explain what its chips could do for doctors and drugmakers. On Wednesday, the organisers told CNN's Meg Tirrell, who was moderating the panel, that Powell had pulled out. No reason was given.
Hours earlier, The New York Times had reported that Powell, 48, had an extramarital relationship with Jensen Huang, 63, Nvidia's founder and her direct boss. Both are married, according to the report.
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The Times cited five people who had worked at Nvidia. Two said the pair had been captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose hotel during Nvidia's GTC developer conference in March. The Times said it had not seen the footage. Powell, Huang and Nvidia have not confirmed the account.
That March, Huang had stood onstage in San Jose and laid out a path to more than $1 trillion in business. Eight months later, the detail from GTC that investors were trying to make sense of came from two unnamed sources describing what they said happened away from the stage.
By Wednesday evening, The Wall Street Journal was reporting that Nvidia's board was preparing to oust Huang and could meet that night. The stock had closed at $173.73 despite a downgrade from Baird. By 5:35 p.m. Eastern, it was down 8.3% in after-hours trading, at $159.37.
The engineer who took Nvidia into hospitals
Powell's first job at Nvidia was to get its graphics chips inside medical imaging equipment. She joined in 2008 from Planar Systems, where she had worked in engineering and product management on diagnostic displays, the screens clinicians use to read scans.
She had studied electrical engineering at Northeastern University, with a concentration in computer engineering. At Planar, her work was on the screen a clinician looked at. At Nvidia, she moved to the computing that helped put the image there.
The imaging assignment grew into a much wider job. Powell went on to lead Nvidia's higher education and research business, AI Labs and Inception, its programme for startups.
By the mid-2010s, she was a senior director in deep-learning business development, explaining publicly why graphics chips were suited to training AI systems. She took charge of healthcare in 2017. Nine years later, her remit stretches from the machines that produce medical images to the software researchers use to design drugs.
The work gave her a platform of her own. At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, she made the case for using generative AI in drug discovery. Nvidia built BioNeMo for that work and teamed up with clinical research giant IQVIA on AI tools for healthcare and life sciences. After the Times report, a former Nvidia employee questioned Powell's healthcare credentials in an account to CNBC. Her career record shows exactly where that experience began, years before she ran the division, in the engineering of equipment used to read medical scans.
One of 60 people who report to the founder
The public accounts leave open how Powell and Huang first met. The reporting line is clear. Powell is one of roughly 60 executives who answer directly to Huang, a founder who has spent 33 years running Nvidia and kept an unusually large number of decisions close to him. The Times reported that Nvidia has rules discouraging relationships between managers and subordinates. A company built around direct access to its founder now faces an allegation involving one of the people who answers to him.
When Powell's name surfaced, Nvidia's directors were already dealing with a separate case involving Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le. She is unrelated to Jensen Huang and was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore customer that had bought more than $4.8 billion in Nvidia chips over two years, according to the Times account cited by Dexerto.
Nvidia initially described their interactions as ordinary customer contact. US intelligence officials believed Alice Huang worked for Chinese intelligence, according to news reports. Beijing rejected the allegation on October 30. The Financial Times later reported that a US intelligence memo alleged a romantic relationship between her and the Nvidia chief.
“I was unfaithful to my wife,” Huang wrote to employees on November 8. He did not name the woman in the letter. That day, Nvidia's board announced an independent investigation into reports that Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort. Directors said they still had confidence in him and had no reason at that point to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised. Two days later, they named the lawyer who would lead the review, former acting US attorney Joon H. Kim of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Nvidia has yet to say whether his inquiry will cover the allegations involving Powell.
The days Nvidia has left before earnings
By the time the Journal reported that directors were preparing to remove Huang, a proposed shareholder class action had already been filed in San Jose over Nvidia's disclosures about Alice Huang. Three Republican House committee chairs, Brian Mast, John Moolenaar and Rick Crawford, had requested a closed-door briefing for November 18 on Huang's dealings with her and Nvidia's safeguards against espionage. Two House Republicans raised the possibility of a subpoena if he did not appear voluntarily.
Nvidia reports quarterly results on Tuesday, November 17, US time, a day before that proposed briefing. As of Thursday morning in India, Huang was still chief executive and Nvidia had named no successor. D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told Fortune that the crisis was accelerating a transition the company was unprepared for. Dan Ives estimated that Nvidia could be worth 25% to 30% less without its founder.
In Washington, the summit programme still listed Powell as Nvidia's vice president of healthcare and life sciences. In California, the company had yet to say whether its investigators would examine the allegations involving her.
After 18 years in which Nvidia sent Powell out to speak for the business she helped build, it was the summit moderator who told the public she would be staying away.
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