LOS ANGELES — For nearly two decades, Kimberly Powell has been the person Nvidia sends out to explain what its chips can do for medicine.
This week, she became a name nobody at the company wanted to see in the headlines.
Powell, 48, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, was named by the New York Times (NYT) yesterday as the senior executive with whom chief executive Jensen Huang allegedly had an extramarital relationship, a claim neither has confirmed.
The NYT, citing five people who worked at the company, said Powell reported to Huang.
Her sudden prominence is the latest twist in a scandal that has engulfed one of the world's most valuable technology companies in less than a week.
Powell's route to Silicon Valley's inner circle began with circuit boards, not boardrooms.
While studying electrical engineering at Northeastern University, she took an internship at a medical imaging company, an early brush with the field she would later help Nvidia enter.
She worked as a hardware engineer at Dome Imaging Systems and as a product manager for diagnostic display systems at Planar Systems before moving to Nvidia.
She joined in 2008 with a narrow brief: to make Nvidia's graphics processors the accelerator of choice for medical imaging equipment.
From there she took on the company's higher education and research business, its AI Labs and Inception, its programme for AI start-ups.
Her LinkedIn profile shows a promotion to senior director of AI business development in 2016.
CNBC has reported that she has led the healthcare group since 2017.
Under her watch, the business grew to include platforms such as BioNeMo for AI-driven biology and drug discovery.
"AI is the biggest technological breakthrough of our lifetime," she has said.
She has also carried that message abroad, headlining a fireside chat in Singapore in 2019 and, according to Taiwan's Liberty Times, leading an Nvidia team to medical centres in Taiwan in 2024.
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The attention came in two stages, a few days apart.
Last Sunday, Huang admitted in a note to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife, and Nvidia's board announced an independent investigation into reports that he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.
The relationship he admitted to was widely reported to be with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen and a former senior executive at Singapore-based data centre company Megaspeed.
US intelligence reportedly circulated a memo alleging she was an asset of China's Ministry of State Security, an allegation Beijing has rejected.
Then came yesterday's report.
The NYT said Powell is among the roughly 60 executives who report directly to Huang, and that both are married to other people.
The NYT also said Huang and Powell were seen being affectionate at a hotel in San Jose during Nvidia's annual developer GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, in March, but added that it had not seen any footage.
Huang and Nvidia have declined to comment, and Powell did not respond to NYT.
Nvidia shares fell 8.3 per cent in after-hours trading that evening and continues to slide a day later.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Nvidia board was preparing to meet to decide Huang's future in the company he co-founded.
Nvidia sits at the centre of the global race in artificial intelligence, and its chips are a pressure point in US-China technology rivalry.
Huang has no publicly known succession plan.
The company is due to report third-quarter results in five days, on November 17.
For the board, a relationship between the CEO and a direct report, if the allegations are borne out, raises questions of governance and workplace conduct that go beyond their private lives.
The Daily Beast reported that Powell is married to Graham Gerade, 54, who is listed as a co-inventor of a medical imaging viewer application on a US patent.
Gerade is not accused of any wrongdoing.
For Powell, the episode puts a career built on two decades of engineering and healthcare work in front of a global audience, and for now it rests on a single newspaper report.
Malay Mail has not independently verified the allegations.
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