Wednesday evening should have been a quiet one for Nvidia. The stock had climbed nearly 3% during the day, clawing back some of the losses from a brutal week. Then, minutes after the closing bell, two of the biggest newspapers in America dropped reports that changed everything.
Jensen Huang, the co-founder who built Nvidia into the most valuable company in the AI boom, may be about to lose his job. His own board, according to the Wall Street Journal, is preparing to remove him as chief executive.
The reason, the Journal reported, is not a failed product or a missed earnings target. It is a second reported extramarital affair — this time with a senior executive who worked directly for him — on top of the first affair that had already triggered a board investigation, a shareholder lawsuit and a congressional inquiry.
For a company worth roughly $4 trillion, and for an industry that depends on its chips for almost every serious AI system on the planet, the stakes could hardly be higher. Investors reacted the way investors always react to uncertainty at the very top: they sold.
A Second Report Changes Everything for Jensen Huang
The day began with a report from the New York Times. Citing five people who worked at the company, the newspaper said Huang had a romantic relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare.
Powell, 48, joined Nvidia in 2008 and oversees programmes that apply chip technology to healthcare, including medical imaging devices. According to the Times, she reported directly to Huang.
The newspaper said the pair were captured on video being affectionate at a hotel in San Jose, California, in March, during one of Nvidia’s major conferences. When the Times reached Huang by phone and asked about Powell, he replied, “I don’t think you should be talking to me directly.” Then he hung up.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and Reuters said it could not immediately verify the reports. But the damage was done. Within hours, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s board was preparing to oust its founder and chief executive.
What the Wall Street Journal Reported About Nvidia’s Board
The Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said the board was preparing to meet as soon as Wednesday to decide Huang’s future. All options were on the table, including his possible dismissal.
The report tied the board’s preparations directly to the two relationships. One involved Alice Huang, a woman US intelligence agencies suspect of working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The other involved Powell, an employee inside the company.
That second relationship matters enormously for the board. A chief executive’s affair with a subordinate raises questions that go far beyond personal conduct: power imbalances, favouritism, workplace policy and whether the board can trust its leader’s judgment at all.
According to CNBC, rumours of a relationship between Huang and Powell had circulated inside the company for years. One anonymous employee told the network that the talk was partly fuelled by Powell’s limited experience in healthcare or science.
How the First Affair Started the Crisis
The crisis began over the weekend. On Sunday, November 8, Huang admitted in a message to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife and took “full responsibility” for it. He gave no details about the relationship.
The same day, Nvidia’s board launched an independent investigation into whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. It later hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to lead the inquiry, with Joon H. Kim among the lawyers involved.
The woman at the centre of that first affair is Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data centre supplier and one of Nvidia’s largest customers in Southeast Asia. US intelligence agencies suspect her of facilitating shipments of Nvidia chips to Chinese firms, and of passing information to Beijing.
According to earlier reports, Huang first became involved with Alice Huang last year. The board has said it sees no evidence that national security or company secrets were compromised, but the investigation continues.
Investors were not reassured. On Monday, November 9, Nvidia shares fell 4.3%, wiping about $190 billion from the company’s value. A shareholder class action was filed within minutes of the closing bell, claiming management failed to disclose information about the relationship to investors.
Nvidia Shares Plunge 8% After Hours
Wednesday’s session had looked like a recovery. Nvidia closed the regular session at $173.73, up 2.87% on the day, after three sessions of losses. Then the Journal’s report landed.
In after-hours trading, the shares plunged. By 6 p.m. New York time they were trading at $159.31, down $14.42, or 8.30%, from the close. Some reports put the drop above 9% at its worst point.
Including Wednesday’s after-hours selloff, Nvidia has lost about $600 billion in stock market value this week since the board announced its investigation. The selloff also dragged on partners: shares in CoreWeave, a major Nvidia customer, had soared nearly 25% earlier in the day before the news broke.
The broader market, by contrast, had a strong day. The S&P 500 rose 1.31% and the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.60%, powered by tech stocks. Nvidia’s collapse was its own story.
Why Removing Jensen Huang Would Shake the AI Industry
Huang, 63, co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has run it ever since. Under his leadership, a graphics chip company became the dominant supplier of the processors that power the global AI boom, and one of the most valuable companies on Earth.
He owns about 3.6% of Nvidia’s stock. More importantly, he is the public face of the AI revolution — the leather-jacketed showman who announces each new chip generation on stage to packed arenas, and the strategist who bet the company on AI long before it was fashionable.
That is exactly why his removal would be so disruptive. Nvidia has no obvious successor and no formal succession plan. As Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, put it: “Huang being removed immediately could be challenging for Nvidia since it does not have a succession plan in place.”
Luria added that the board was likely to act only once it had proof that Huang broke the law or violated company policy. The investigation by Wachtell Lipton is still under way, and the board has not yet said what it has found.
The leadership question also arrives at a delicate moment. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on November 17, and it sits at the centre of the US-China technology rivalry. Three Republican committee chairmen in the House have asked Huang for a closed-door briefing about Alice Huang, and he faces a possible subpoena if he declines.
What Happens Next for Nvidia
The board’s meeting was expected as early as Wednesday evening, but no decision had been announced by the time markets closed. The next signal may come before the opening bell on Thursday, or it may take days.
Several paths are possible. The board could remove Huang outright, ask him to step aside while the investigation continues, or conclude that the evidence does not justify dismissal and keep him in place. Each option carries its own risks.
Removing a founder-CEO with no successor lined up would plunge the world’s most important chipmaker into a leadership vacuum. Keeping him would leave the board exposed to shareholders and lawmakers who are already asking hard questions about governance and national security.
For now, the only certainty is the scale of the fallout. A week ago, the story was a personal scandal. Today it is a boardroom crisis at the heart of the AI industry, with $600 billion of shareholder value gone and a chief executive’s future hanging on a meeting that may already be under way.
Sources: reporting by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, via SiliconANGLE. For the earlier chapter of this story, see Wasl Tech’s report on Nvidia’s $190 billion selloff, the H200 chips reaching a blacklisted Chinese university, and TSMC’s $1 billion bet on Anthropic and OpenAI.
