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In the space of a few hours on Wednesday, the crisis engulfing Jensen Huang went from a board investigation to a possible exit. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia's board is preparing to remove its founder and chief executive — and investors reacted at once, sending the chipmaker's shares down almost 10% in after-hours trading.
It is a stunning turn for the man who built Nvidia into the engine of the artificial-intelligence age. Just three days earlier, the board had said it retained confidence in him. Now, according to the Journal, directors could meet as soon as Wednesday to decide his future — and no successor has been named.
What the Journal reported
According to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, Nvidia's board is preparing to oust Huang and could meet as soon as Wednesday to determine his future at the company. No decision has been announced, and no interim chief executive or successor has been named. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the reports — so the removal remains, for now, a reported preparation rather than a done deal. But the market did not wait for confirmation.
The report landed hours after a separate revelation from The New York Times — and it is the combination of the two that turned a personal scandal into a boardroom crisis.
The second affair allegation
The Times reported that Huang had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, 48, Nvidia's vice-president of healthcare, who reports directly to him. The newspaper cited five people who have worked at the company. According to two former employees cited by the Times, Huang and Powell were seen displaying affection towards each other at a hotel in San Jose during the company's annual developer conference in March; two of the sources said the interaction was recorded on a mobile phone, though the newspaper said it had not independently viewed the footage.
Powell has worked at Nvidia since 2008 and has led its healthcare work since 2017. Both Huang and Powell are married to other people, the Times reported. When the Times called Huang on Wednesday and asked about the relationship, he replied: "I don't think you should be talking to me directly." He then hung up. Neither Nvidia nor Powell immediately responded to requests for comment.
A relationship with a direct report matters more than a private affair, because it is a governance question. Nvidia's own code of conduct tells staff to avoid situations that create conflicts of interest, including personal relationships, and says the company promptly investigates reports of misconduct. A relationship between a chief executive and an executive who reports to him sits squarely inside that rule — and it gives the board a problem that has nothing to do with the espionage claims.
How the market reacted
Investors moved fast. Nvidia shares plunged nearly 10% at one point during extended trading on Wednesday, according to Nikkei Asia, after the Journal's report emerged. Le Monde put the after-hours fall at more than 8%. The drop is striking because, earlier in the day, the stock had actually risen even after Barron's reported the first Wall Street call for Huang to step down. It was the ouster report — not the affair allegation alone — that turned the market.
For a company valued at roughly $4.5 trillion in recent weeks, a fall of that size wipes out hundreds of billions of dollars in a single evening. It also puts the board under immediate pressure to say something concrete: investors can live with a scandal, but they cannot price a vacuum at the top of the world's most valuable chipmaker. The scale of the move is a reminder of how much of the recent market selloff has been tied to confidence in a handful of AI leaders — and how quickly that confidence can break.
How we got here
The crisis began with a different relationship. In a staff memo on Sunday, Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife, writing: "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry." The woman in that case was Alice Huang, a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data-centre company and Nvidia customer, whom US intelligence assessments — described in a memo overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and reported by The New York Times — concluded had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. That is an allegation, not an established finding, and Huang has not admitted that she was a spy.
On the same day, Nvidia's board opened an independent investigation, led by a committee of independent directors and the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, into whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort. The board said it had "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that it retained confidence in Huang. Three House committees have also requested a closed-door briefing with Huang, reportedly for November 18, and Nvidia is scheduled to report third-quarter results on November 17 — two dates that now carry far more weight than they did a week ago.
Why this reaches beyond one chief executive
Nvidia is not just another big company. Its processors are the hardware the AI boom runs on, and Huang — its co-founder and chief executive since 1993 — has been the public face of that boom, arguing loudly in Washington that the United States should ease restrictions on selling advanced AI chips to China. If the board removes him, the question is not only who runs Nvidia, but whether the AI trade itself can hold its nerve while its most important company searches for a leader. Nvidia's 2026 proxy statement says nothing about succession planning for the chief executive, and no successor has been named.
There is also a wider lesson in how fast this moved. On Sunday the story was a personal admission and a board inquiry. By Wednesday it was a second allegation, a reported plan to remove the chief executive, and a near-10% share plunge. Each step made the next one easier: the admission invited scrutiny, the scrutiny produced a second report, and the second report gave the board a governance case it did not have before. Scandals rarely end a chief executive on their own. What ends them is the moment a board decides the story has become the company — and on Wednesday evening, Nvidia's board looked to be reaching exactly that moment.
The next facts that matter are simple: whether the board actually meets, what it decides, and what Nvidia tells investors before its results on November 17. Until then, the most valuable chipmaker in the world is being run by a chief executive whose own board is reportedly preparing to remove him — and the market has already delivered its verdict on the uncertainty. Read the original reporting in The New York Times and the market reaction in Nikkei Asia.