Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, has been named in a New York Times report as having had an extramarital relationship with CEO Jensen Huang, to whom she reports. The report, citing five people who worked at the company, adds to the pressure on Huang, who is already under investigation by Nvidia’s board over a separate affair. The claims have not been confirmed by Nvidia, Huang or Powell.
Powell, 48, is one of Nvidia’s longest-serving executives and the person who built its healthcare business from scratch. Here is a look at her career.
Nvidia’s Head Of Healthcare
Powell is Vice President and General Manager of Healthcare at Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California. According to Nvidia’s website, she is responsible for the company’s worldwide healthcare business, including the hardware and software platforms for accelerated computing, AI and visualization that power the ecosystem of medical imaging, life sciences, drug discovery and healthcare analytics.
She has held the vice president role since October 2017, and has been at Nvidia for more than 18 years.
Career
Powell began her career in medical imaging in 1999, working as a hardware engineer at DOME Imaging Systems, which made displays and systems for radiology. In 2003 she moved to the medical business unit of Planar Systems, first as a hardware engineer and then, from 2006, as a product marketing manager. Her work there centred on diagnostic imaging display systems.
She joined Nvidia in May 2008 as a director of worldwide business development for higher education and healthcare, with a specific brief: to establish Nvidia’s GPUs as the accelerator platform for medical imaging instruments. Her remit covered worldwide evangelism and go-to-market strategy for Nvidia’s visual computing platforms in the two industries. On the healthcare side, she built partnerships with leading universities and Fortune 100 healthcare companies, focused on medical imaging and life science instruments. On the higher education side, her team worked with researchers in fields like computational chemistry, bioinformatics, machine learning and computer vision to use GPU computing, and pushed to get parallel computing taught in universities.
In March 2016, as deep learning began to take off, she was promoted to senior director of AI business development, leading a team of business development and strategic alliance managers focused on deep learning, data analytics and AI. The role involved partnering with academic researchers, application developers and startups to build an ecosystem around Nvidia’s AI platform. Nvidia’s website says she also led strategic evangelism programs, Nvidia AI Labs and the Nvidia Inception program, which supports AI startups.
In October 2017, Powell was appointed vice president of healthcare, putting her in charge of Nvidia’s entire healthcare push. In the years since, the business has expanded well beyond medical imaging into areas such as drug discovery and digital biology. Nvidia has said its platform supports more than 1,000 healthcare startups building AI products.
Education
Powell’s LinkedIn profile lists executive education in product design, development and management from the MIT Sloan School of Management (2007) and a graduate certificate in project management from Boston University (2005-2006). Other biographies note that she holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, with a concentration in computer engineering, from Northeastern University.
A Public Face For Nvidia
Powell is one of the faces Nvidia sends to healthcare and life sciences audiences. She regularly speaks at industry events such as the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, and delivers speeches on behalf of the company at conferences around the world. At Nvidia’s GTC developer conference in March, she spoke about using AI to aid breakthroughs in healthcare and biology. She is scheduled to give a special address at GTC Berlin on October 20-22, according to her LinkedIn.
Her recent LinkedIn posts show the themes she pushes. She has argued that open-weight AI models matter for healthcare because the industry is regulated and depends on trust, echoing a line Huang has taken on open and closed models. She has welcomed Nvidia’s agreement to acquire Hugging Face, and backed the Open Agent Safety Platform that Nvidia launched with industry partners. She has also called attention to Nvidia-backed startups working on breast cancer care, and to a federated learning network that lets five pharma companies improve a drug discovery model without sharing proprietary data. Several of her posts reshare messages from Huang and Nvidia’s official accounts.
What The New York Times Reported
According to the Times, Powell and Huang, 63, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose hotel during GTC in March, as per two people who worked at the company. The paper said it has not seen the video. Both are married to other people. The Times said Huang’s security team sequestered a bystander who had filmed the interaction and offered them a non-disclosure agreement, according to three people briefed on the incident.
The paper noted that Nvidia’s code of conduct tells employees to avoid situations that create conflicts, including those involving personal relationships. Asked about Powell, Huang reportedly said, “I don’t think you should be talking to me directly,” and hung up. Nvidia declined to comment, and Powell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Where Huang Stands
The report comes as Huang faces one of the most difficult periods of his tenure. On November 8, he told employees in a memo that he had been unfaithful to his wife, following earlier reporting that U.S. officials believed a Megaspeed executive, Alice Huang, who is no relation to him, was a Chinese intelligence asset. Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation, and Huang has since pulled out of public appearances. He is far from the first chief executive whose personal life has spilled into the boardroom, as this list of CEOs and founders who have had affairs shows.
This article is based on reporting by The New York Times, Nvidia’s website and Kimberly Powell’s LinkedIn profile. The claims about a relationship have not been independently verified, and Nvidia, Jensen Huang and Kimberly Powell have not publicly confirmed them.