Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, had an intimate relationship with CEO Jensen Huang, according to a New York Times report on Wednesday that cited five company sources.
Powell, 48, reports to Huang, 63. The Times reported 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 is already under investigation at Nvidia on whether he was the target of a “foreign intelligence effort.” The Times had reported that US officials believed another woman he grew close with, tech executive Alice Huang, may have been recruited by the Chinese government to spy on the chip giant. The Nvidia CEO admitted to being “unfaithful” to his wife in a note to staff on Sunday.
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.
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“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
Huang, one of the entire tech industry’s best-known representatives, has led Nvidia since he founded the company in 1993, so he and Powell have worked together for over 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.
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