Nvidia stock slid about 7% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after The New York Times reported that chief executive Jensen Huang had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president of healthcare, who reports to him.
The shares had closed the regular session up 2.87% at $173.73, according to Nasdaq.com. By 6:54pm ET (11:54pm GMT) they were changing hands at $161.50, down 7.04% from that close.
At one point in extended trade the stock fell below $158, more than 9% under the close, according to 5-minute data from Yahoo Finance.
The sharpest leg of the fall came after a second report.
The Wall Street Journal, as relayed by CNBC and Reuters, said Nvidia’s board was preparing to oust Huang and could meet as soon as Wednesday to decide his future.
Nvidia, Huang and Powell have not confirmed the Powell allegations. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the reports.
What The New York Times reported
The Times said Huang and Powell had a relationship, citing five people who worked at Nvidia, according to Reuters. The paper said both are married to other people.
According to the Times, as summarised by Tom’s Hardware and Axios, a bystander filmed the two “being affectionate” at a San Jose hotel during Nvidia’s GTC conference in March.
The same report said Huang’s security team sequestered the person who filmed it and offered them a nondisclosure agreement. The Verge noted that the Times has not seen the video itself.
When the Times reached Huang by phone and asked about Powell, he replied: “I don’t think you should be talking to me directly.” He then hung up, according to the paper as cited by Reuters.
Nvidia declined to issue a statement to the Times, and Powell did not respond to requests for comment from the Times, CNBC or Reuters.
The account therefore rests on unnamed sources and a video the newspaper has not viewed, and it has not been tested in any formal process.
Who is Kimberly Powell?
Powell is a long-serving Nvidia executive rather than a public figure. Her Nvidia biography describes her as vice president of healthcare, responsible for the company’s worldwide healthcare business.
That business covers hardware and software for accelerated computing, AI and visualisation used in medical imaging, life sciences, drug discovery and healthcare analytics.
She joined Nvidia in 2008 to establish its graphics processors as the accelerator platform for medical imaging instruments, according to the same biography.
She previously led Nvidia’s higher education and research business, NVIDIA AI Labs and the NVIDIA Inception programme for AI start-ups.
Her BIO International Convention profile says she began her career in engineering and product management for diagnostic display systems at Planar Systems, and holds an electrical engineering degree from Northeastern University. Her LinkedIn profile dates her healthcare leadership role to October 2017.
Platforms associated with her unit include BioNeMo for AI-driven biology and drug discovery, MONAI for medical imaging AI and Parabricks for genomics, according to her Milken Institute speaker biography.
She is a regular speaker at Nvidia’s GTC conference, where she has talked about using AI to speed up drug discovery, CNBC said.
Healthcare is a small business next to Nvidia’s data centre GPUs, CNBC noted, so the market relevance of the report lies in what it means for Huang.
Why the word ‘another’ matters
Wednesday’s report is the second personal-conduct story about Huang in two weeks, and the two are distinct.
On October 29, the Times reported that US intelligence officials suspected Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore cloud company Megaspeed, of being a Chinese intelligence asset, and that she had grown close to Jensen Huang, according to TechCrunch. The two are not related. Nvidia said at the time that his interactions with her were normal customer meetings.
On November 8, Huang told staff in a message: “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” according to CNBC. He did not name the woman. The Times and the Financial Times identified her as Alice Huang. China has rejected the espionage allegations.
The same day, the Nvidia board opened an independent investigation, overseen by independent directors, into whether Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. It said it had “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised” and that it had “confidence in Jensen”.
So the only relationship Huang has admitted is the one connected to the spy reporting. The alleged relationship with Powell is a separate, unconfirmed claim.
A stock that was already falling
Nvidia was under pressure before Wednesday’s reports. The stock lost 9.5% across Monday and Tuesday, from $186.64 at Friday’s close to $168.89, after Huang’s admission and the board’s announcement, according to Yahoo Finance closing prices.
Wednesday’s regular-session gain of 2.87% lagged a broad chip rebound. AMD rose 7.32%, Broadcom 3.99% and the PHLX Semiconductor index 5.66%, while the Nasdaq Composite added 1.60%.
The longer comparison is starker. From the October 28 close, the day before the first Times report, to Wednesday’s close, Nvidia fell 19.3%. Over the same period the PHLX Semiconductor index dropped 9.6%, AMD 4.4% and Broadcom 1.9%.
Part of that slide was sector-wide: chip stocks fell sharply on November 5, which CNBC linked to post-midterm worries about the AI build-out. Nvidia’s underperformance since suggests investors are also pricing in a Huang-specific risk.
Wednesday’s after-hours price of $161.50 is about 13% below where Nvidia started the year ($186.50 on December 31), while the PHLX Semiconductor index is up about 49% this year. It is also below the stock’s previous 52-week low of $164.27.
Nasdaq.com put Nvidia’s market value at about $4.19 trillion at the close. At the after-hours price that would be about $3.89 trillion, on Invezz’s arithmetic. Reuters said the company had lost about $600 billion in value this week, including the after-hours fall.
A 7% after-hours fall is a large move for a company of this size, but extended-hours trading is thin and prices can shift when Thursday’s regular session opens.
Key-person risk moves to the centre
For investors, the question is less about Huang’s private life than about who runs Nvidia.
Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, told Reuters that removing Huang immediately “could be challenging for Nvidia since it does not have a succession plan in place”. He added that if Huang broke the law or company policies, the board was likely to act once it had proof.
Huang has said he has about 60 direct reports, TechCrunch noted, and there is no obvious second-in-command. Peter Jaworski, a business ethics professor at Georgetown University, told Axios: “You can’t have a relationship like this with a direct report.”
On Invezz’s Zero Sum podcast, recorded before the Powell report, Wealth Club’s Susannah Streeter called the idea that Huang’s downfall would sink Nvidia “completely overblown”, according to the episode notes. She said she expected the company to promote other leaders so investors can see a succession bench.
Next come the outcome of the board meeting, Thursday’s regular session and Nvidia’s quarterly results, which Nasdaq.com lists for November 17. Until the board speaks, the Powell allegations remain unconfirmed reporting, and the share price is reacting to the risk of losing Nvidia’s founder as much as to the claims themselves.
AI disclosure: AI tools assisted with research and drafting of this piece. An Invezz editor reviewed the facts, sources and wording before publication. Any opinions or analysis are Invezz’s, not those of an automated system.
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