To oust or not to oust – an unenviable dilemma for any company board. But for the ten highly remunerated members of Nvidia’s senior leadership team, determining the future of the firm’s legendary co-founder Jensen Huang – following the astonishing revelations that he’d had an extra-marital affair with an alleged Chinese spy – was exceptionally challenging.
Should they decide to unseat him, trillions of dollars could be lost in the firm’s share price, to say nothing of the impact on a company whose fortunes had been interwoven with the billionaire for more than 30 years.
Then, even as the board was gathering for the meeting on Wednesday, news broke that Huang had strayed a second time.
To the grievous offence of consorting with a Chinese ‘businesswoman’ suspected by the US government of passing secrets to Beijing was now added a new and – in the U.S. corporate world – equally serious offence of having conducted a sexual relationship with one of his own subordinates.
Huang, the 63-year-old CEO of the gargantuan company that is at the heart of the AI boom, had been captured in a video shot by a bystander ‘being affectionate’ with Kimberly Powell, 48, Nvidia’s ‘vice president of healthcare’, at a hotel in San Jose, California.
Like Huang, Powell is married, and Nvidia has strict rules on relationships between colleagues, particularly bosses and employees, as was the case here.
Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, 63, has been married to his wife Lori (seen together in April 2026) for over 40 years after they met as lab partners at Oregon State University in the 1980s
Huang was captured ‘being affectionate’ with Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, Kimberley Powell, in a video shot by a bystander at a hotel in San Jose, California
Huang’s security staff reportedly asked the bystander who filmed the encounter to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The New York Times said that when it phoned Huang on Wednesday to ask about the alleged second affair, he replied: ‘I don’t think you should be talking to me directly,’ and hung up.
Sources said company executives already knew about the Powell relationship and board members had been considering ousting the Taiwanese-American boss even before it became public.
Regardless of his central importance both to Nvidia’s stellar success and the wider AI revolution – not to mention his closeness to President Donald Trump – the double scandal rendered Huang’s position untenable for the board.
Last night, hours after Huang’s ousting, reports came in of a third alleged affair – an ‘intimate relationship’ with a second, so-far-unnamed Nvidia employee, according to the Reuters news agency. To many industry insiders, his effectively forced resignation yesterday morning was inevitable, even if its consequences were far harder to predict. One senior Trump official offered the Daily Mail a grim forecast of the fallout from Huang’s downfall: ‘The world economy is f****d.’
Nvidia is the world’s only source of the chips that make the computations behind AI possible. Huang’s role at the company has been so dominant that some have described the firm, for all its 42,000 employees, as a ‘one-man band’. His loss is difficult to exaggerate.
Nvidia began investigating after reports of his affair with Alice Huang, a suspected spy working for the Chinese Communist Party, were published in the New York Times
The shock ousting already comes at a time of growing anxiety about the share prices of tech giants and the extent to which they have been propping up markets. Fears that frenzied AI investment is a huge bubble will only be fuelled by the downfall of one of the technology’s greatest cheerleaders.
Sure enough, Nvidia shares promptly plunged by as much as 14 per cent following yesterday’s announcement.
In a statement, Nvidia rightly described Huang’s contributions to the company as ‘profound’. Rarely has the downfall of an industry-conquering tycoon, and one of the world’s richest people with a personal fortune estimated at $155 billion, been so dramatic, so rapid or so total. In a matter of days, Huang has gone from being a superhero to the punchline in countless jokes about the pathetic vanity of middle-aged men in leather jackets.
Barely a week ago, he was still being feted as the pre-eminent superstar of the tech boom, who generated trillions of dollars in value for shareholders.
In his native Taiwan, the workaholic, perfectionist entrepreneur was a hometown hero treated like a rock star. Crowds of women fawned over a silver-haired genius who liked to suggest he was different from the average tech geek, with his impressive wardrobe of Tom Ford couture.
Sources said company executives already knew about the Powell relationship (seen) and board members had been considering ousting Huang before it became public, writes Tom Leonard
However, it finally started to fall apart last Sunday when he admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife of 39 years, Lori Mills, when the New York Times reported that he had been having an affair with 49-year-old Alice Huang (no relation). The report added that US intelligence suspected Ms Huang of being a spy working on behalf the Chinese Communist Party. Nvidia greeted the bombshell news by announcing an independent investigation into whether Huang had been the ‘target of a foreign intelligence effort’.
The Chinese dismissed the claims as ‘groundless smears’.
Huang, who had only a month earlier insisted his interactions with Alice were typical of those with Chinese customers and executives, and ‘completely normal’, suddenly prostrated himself before his staff.
‘I know an apology cannot undo what I have done,’ he grovelled in an email. ‘I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.’
As for Ms Huang, the couple had been photographed many times together at official events and dinners across Asia and California in 2024 and 2025. Her whereabouts are currently unknown. She hasn’t commented on the furore.
She remains a mysterious figure. We do know that she hails from a rural part of Hunan province and became a presenter on Chinese state TV.
She moved to Hong Kong in the mid-2000s to take a Master’s degree in media studies, later moving into finance – learning the basics at the British bank HSBC.
Bizarrely, she seems to have met Jensen through her businessman husband Kang Wei, whom the Nvidia chief had known for a decade through their shared work on video-game chips.
Insiders told the Wall Street Journal that Kang had been aware that his wife had been seeing Jensen for two years and would boast of their closeness, saying, ‘half-jokingly’, that she was his personal assistant.
Ms Huang and Kang Wei had tried out various business ventures over the past years before landing on the lucrative market of selling Nvidia chips.
Although the US bans sales of the most advanced chips to China, Alice and her husband allegedly shipped billions of dollars’ worth to the country through a Singapore-based company, Megaspeed International, they had set up together.
The US intelligence agencies believe that the willowy Ms Huang was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security – its equivalent of the CIA – because of her access to Jensen. His influence with Mr Trump – the pair have become close as the latter recognised the importance of AI – would have been a huge bonus, note insiders.
Now that it’s alleged that Huang has been unfaithful with not one but three women, many are wondering if the boss may find himself booted out not only from Nvidia but from his marriage – with potentially even costlier implications.
He has been married since 1985 to Lori, the mother of his two children – Spencer and Madison, both in their 30s and now working for Nvidia – and the woman who played an important part in his business.
She has yet to comment on this week’s events.
Jensen married Lori, his college sweetheart, long before he founded Nvidia with two friends back in 1993, at a roadside diner where he’d once worked as a dishwasher and waiter.
The couple met at Oregon State University and Huang has described Lori as having ‘been part of Nvidia every step of the way’. He reportedly told his senior colleagues that she manages their life behind the scenes, including signing paperwork and handling their finances. He once joked that he didn’t even know their home address let alone pay any of their bills.
It hardly sounds, then, like she would go into a divorce battle unprepared. Official Nvidia financial filings show most of his company shares – he has direct control of some 70million or some 3.5 per cent – are held in trusts in which both of them are co-trustees.
One thing is clear – this scandal isn’t over. When Democrats take control of Congress in January, they are expected to return to it with a vengeance.
Mr Trump, who personally owns Nvidia shares and approached the company to fund his lavish White House ballroom development, could be interrogated.
Even after US intelligence warned about Huang’s reliability, the President continued to keep him close – including on a trip to China. He also listened to Huang’s advice that the US should sell as many Nvidia chips to China as Beijing could buy.
And why has the Trump administration proved so lackadaisical about stopping its main international adversary from developing AI?
A source close to the State Department told the Daily Mail it was ‘chaos behind the scenes’ at Nvidia, adding: ‘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 speculation last night that Huang may move to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Musk has already said it would be ‘an honour’ to work with him.
Given the company’s crucial role through its satellite internet network in defence, especially the defence of Ukraine, that sounds like a very risky idea. Jensen Huang might end up swapping a Chinese honeytrap for a Russian one.
Additional reporting: Phillip Nieto and Elina Shirazi in Washington DC.
