Who Is Kimberly Powell, the Nvidia executive linked to CEO Jensen Huang

Who is Kimberly Powell? Nvidia vice president named in new report alleging extramarital affair with married CEO Jensen Huang. (NVIDIA Blog)

Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, is now at the centre of a new report about CEO Jensen Huang. According to a recent report by New York Times, Huang also had a relationship with Powell, who reports to him, quoting give people who worked at the company and spoke anonymously.

Nvidia, Huang and Powell have not yet confirmed the claims. For those unaware, Powell is one of Nvidia’s longest-serving senior executives and have spent more than 18 years at the company and also helped in building its healthcare business into a key growth area for the AI chip giant. Presently, Powell serves as vice president of healthcare at Nvidia where she oversees the company's worldwide healthcare operations.

Her responsibilities span hardware and software platforms used for accelerated computing, artificial intelligence, medical imaging, life sciences, drug discovery and healthcare analytics.

Kimberly Powell joined Nvidia in 2008

According to her Nvidia profile, Powell joined the company in 2008 with the goal of establishing Nvidia GPUs as an accelerator platform for medical imaging systems. Over the years, she took on a series of leadership roles as Nvidia expanded beyond graphics processing into AI and high-performance computing applications.

Before leading Nvidia's healthcare division, Powell oversaw the company's higher education and research business and was involved with several strategic initiatives, including NVIDIA AI Labs and the NVIDIA Inception startup programme.

Her LinkedIn profile identifies her as being based in Santa Clara, California.

Background in engineering and medical imaging

Powell's career began in engineering and medical imaging technology. In an interview with Healthcare Brew earlier this year, she recalled working with a medical imaging company before joining Nvidia, where she saw first-hand how advances in imaging technology could improve healthcare outcomes. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northeastern University and has worked across hardware engineering, product management and business development roles focused on medical technology and AI

Key figure in Nvidia's healthcare push

As Nvidia is working on increasing the role of AI in healthcare, Powell has become company’s most visible executive in this sector. She has also spoken about applications of AI in medical imaging, genomics, drug discovery, clinical research and hospital operations on many occasions. In some of her recent interviews, Powell also stressed on the importance of growing role of generative AI and accelerated computing in helping healthcare organisations to improve clinical workflows, advance research and speed up the development of new treatments

What the report says about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s relationship with Kimberly Powell

The Times said the relationship, which had not been previously reported, was discussed inside Nvidia.

Powell is 48 and Huang is 63. When the Times reached Huang by phone and asked about Powell, he said he didn’t think the reporter should be speaking to him directly and hung up. Nvidia did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.The report came days after Nvidia’s board opened an investigation into Huang over his ties to Alice Huang, a woman US officials believe was recruited by Chinese intelligence. Huang admitted in a message to staff on Sunday that he had been unfaithful to his wife.

Shortly after the Times story, the Wall Street Journal reported that the board is preparing to remove him, according to coverage of that report. Nvidia shares fell about 3% in extended trading.

President Donald Trump said he had not discussed the allegations with Huang but called him “an honourable guy” who has “done an amazing job for our country.”Nvidia’s code of conduct, which opens with a letter from Huang, lists personal relationships among the situations that can create a conflict of interest. Any relationship between a chief executive and a direct report would raise questions under that policy, as shown in coverage of the code.