Few corporate boards face a more difficult decision than whether to remove a founder. For Nvidia’s 10 highly paid senior leaders, however, weighing Jensen Huang’s future became particularly fraught after extraordinary claims emerged that the company’s celebrated co-founder had an affair with a woman alleged by US authorities to have links to Chinese intelligence.
Removing Huang could have wiped trillions of dollars from Nvidia’s market value, while destabilising a company whose fortunes have been closely tied to the billionaire for more than three decades.
Then, as the board prepared to meet on Wednesday, reports emerged of an alleged second affair.
The allegations now went beyond his reported association with a Chinese “businesswoman” suspected by the US government of passing information to Beijing. Huang was also accused of having a sexual relationship with one of his own subordinates — an offence treated with particular seriousness in the American corporate world.
Huang, 63, leads the vast semiconductor company at the centre of the artificial-intelligence boom. He was reportedly filmed by a bystander appearing “affectionate” with Kimberly Powell, 48, Nvidia’s vice-president of healthcare, at a hotel in San Jose, California.
Both Huang and Powell are married. Nvidia also maintains strict rules governing workplace relationships, especially those involving managers and employees, as was reportedly the case here.
Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, 63, has been married to Lori for more than 40 years after they met as laboratory partners at Oregon State University in the 1980s
Huang was reportedly filmed appearing “affectionate” with Nvidia vice-president of healthcare Kimberly Powell by a bystander at a hotel in San Jose, California
Huang’s security team reportedly asked the person who recorded the encounter to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The New York Times reported that, when contacted on Wednesday about the alleged second affair, Huang replied: “I don’t think you should be talking to me directly,” before ending the call.
Sources said Nvidia executives already knew about the alleged relationship with Powell, and that board members had been discussing Huang’s removal before the claims became public.
Despite Huang’s central role in Nvidia’s extraordinary rise, the broader AI revolution and his reported closeness to President Donald Trump, sources said the double scandal left his position untenable.
Hours after Huang’s removal, Reuters reported a third alleged affair involving an “intimate relationship” with another, unnamed Nvidia employee. To many industry insiders, his effectively forced departure the following morning appeared inevitable, although the consequences were much harder to assess. One senior Trump administration official gave the Daily Mail a bleak prediction: “The world economy is f****d.”
Nvidia is the world’s only source of the advanced chips that power the computations behind AI. Huang’s influence has been so dominant that some observers have described the 42,000-employee company as a “one-man band”. The scale of his loss is therefore difficult to overstate.
Nvidia launched an investigation after The New York Times reported allegations concerning Alice Huang, who was described as a suspected Chinese Communist Party spy
The shock departure comes as investors are already increasingly concerned about the valuations of technology giants and their role in supporting financial markets. The collapse of one of AI’s most prominent evangelists is likely to intensify fears that the sector’s huge investment boom has created a bubble.
Nvidia shares duly fell by as much as 14 per cent after the announcement.
In a statement, Nvidia described Huang’s contribution to the company as “profound”. Few industrial tycoons — particularly one of the world’s richest people, with an estimated fortune of $155 billion — have experienced such a swift and dramatic fall. Within days, Huang had gone from tech superhero to the subject of jokes about the vanity of middle-aged men in leather jackets.
Just a week earlier, he was still being celebrated as the defining superstar of the technology boom, credited with creating trillions of dollars in shareholder value.
In Taiwan, his birthplace, the famously driven and exacting entrepreneur was treated as a national hero. Crowds of admirers gathered around the silver-haired executive, who cultivated an image far removed from that of the stereotypical technology geek, including through his fondness for Tom Ford clothing.
Sources said executives already knew about the alleged Powell relationship and that the board had considered removing Huang before the claims became public, writes Tom Leonard
The unraveling began last Sunday, when The New York Times reported that Huang had been unfaithful to his wife of 39 years, Lori Mills, through an alleged relationship with 49-year-old Alice Huang, who is not related to him. The report also said US intelligence agencies suspected Ms Huang of working as a spy for the Chinese Communist Party. Nvidia responded by announcing an independent investigation into whether its chief executive had been “the target of a foreign intelligence effort”.
Chinese authorities dismissed the allegations as “groundless smears”.
Huang, who only a month earlier had described his interactions with Alice as routine dealings with Chinese customers and executives and “completely normal”, subsequently issued a deeply apologetic message to Nvidia employees.
“I know an apology cannot undo what I have done,” he wrote in an email. “I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.”
Alice Huang and Jensen Huang were photographed together repeatedly at official events and dinners in Asia and California during 2024 and 2025. Her current whereabouts are unknown, and she has not publicly addressed the allegations.
She remains an elusive figure. Reports say she comes from a rural area of Hunan province and went on to work as a presenter for Chinese state television.
In the mid-2000s, she moved to Hong Kong to pursue a master’s degree in media studies before entering finance, where she reportedly began her career at HSBC.
Reports suggest she met Jensen through her businessman husband, Kang Wei, whom the Nvidia chief had known for about a decade through their shared work in video-game chips.
People familiar with the situation told The Wall Street Journal that Kang knew his wife had allegedly been seeing Jensen for two years and would boast about their relationship, joking that she was Huang’s personal assistant.
Alice Huang and Kang Wei reportedly explored several business ventures before moving into the lucrative trade in Nvidia chips.
Although the US prohibits the sale of its most advanced chips to China, the couple allegedly sent billions of dollars’ worth to the country through Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based company they established together.
US intelligence agencies reportedly believe that Ms Huang was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security — the country’s equivalent of the CIA — because of her access to Jensen. Sources said his influence with Mr Trump, with whom he grew close as the President recognised AI’s strategic importance, would have made that access particularly valuable.
With allegations now involving three women, questions are being raised about whether Huang could lose not only his position at Nvidia but also his marriage, with potentially even greater financial consequences.
He has been married to Lori since 1985. She is the mother of their two children, Spencer and Madison, both in their 30s and now employed by Nvidia, and has played an important role in the business behind the scenes.
Lori has not commented on the events of this week.
The couple married long before Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 with two friends, holding the ceremony at a roadside diner where he had previously worked as a dishwasher and waiter.
They met at Oregon State University, and Huang has said Lori was “part of Nvidia every step of the way”. He reportedly told senior colleagues that she handled much of their personal administration, including paperwork and finances. He once joked that he did not even know their home address, let alone pay the household bills.
That suggests she would be well prepared for any divorce negotiations. Nvidia’s financial filings show that most of Huang’s company shares — he directly controls around 70 million, or approximately 3.5 per cent — are held in trusts for which both he and Lori are co-trustees.
One point is already clear: the scandal is far from over. Democrats are expected to revisit the matter aggressively if they regain control of Congress in January.
Mr Trump, who personally owns Nvidia shares and reportedly approached the company about helping fund a lavish ballroom project at the White House, could face questioning.
Even after US intelligence raised concerns about Huang’s reliability, the President continued to keep him close, including during a trip to China. Trump also listened to Huang’s advice that the US should sell Beijing as many Nvidia chips as it was willing to purchase.
That raises questions about why the Trump administration appeared so relaxed about limiting the ability of its principal geopolitical rival to develop AI.
A source close to the State Department told the Daily Mail there had been “chaos behind the scenes” at Nvidia, asking: “Did [Trump] bring someone compromised by a Chinese spy into top-secret briefings? This is potentially impeachable territory. Huang just gave the Democrats huge ammunition.”
There was also speculation that Huang could join Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Musk has already said it would be “an honour” to work with him.
Given SpaceX’s importance to defence through its satellite-internet network, particularly in supporting Ukraine, such a move could carry significant risks. Jensen Huang might, as one observer put it, be trading an alleged Chinese honeytrap for a Russian one.
Additional reporting: Phillip Nieto and Elina Shirazi in Washington DC.
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