After a second affair, Nvidia's board reportedly moves to oust Jensen Huang

What's going on

The most important chipmaker of the AI boom could soon be without its founder. On Wednesday, November 11, 2026, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Nvidia's board is preparing to remove CEO Jensen Huang. The board could meet as early as that same day to decide the 63-year-old's future. Nothing is official yet. No dismissal has been announced, and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

Bloomberg adds, also citing an anonymous source, that the board has already brought in outside help to search for a successor. It is reportedly considering installing an interim CEO first while it looks for a permanent replacement.

Two affairs in a matter of days

The trigger is a series of revelations about Huang's private life. On Sunday, Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife. What makes it explosive: according to Fortune, US intelligence agencies consider the woman he had the relationship with to be a Chinese spy. Nvidia then announced an investigation into whether Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence operation. At the time, the board said it had

"no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia secrets have been compromised."

It added that it would review "all available information."

Then on Wednesday, the New York Times reported a second extramarital relationship, this time with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president for its healthcare business. According to the paper, Huang and Powell were caught on video being affectionate with each other in a San Jose hotel in March during an Nvidia conference. Shacknews says this was most likely the GTC developer conference. According to her LinkedIn profile, Powell has been at Nvidia for almost two decades and previously ran its higher education and research business, among other roles. Fortune could not immediately reach her for comment.

Why the second affair likely carries more weight than the first: a relationship between the CEO and a subordinate could violate Nvidia's code of conduct, which requires employees to avoid personal relationships that create conflicts of interest. The WSJ report about the planned ouster appeared less than an hour after the Times story. Speaking to Fortune about possible internal policy violations, analyst Jay Goldberg of Seaport Research Partners said:

"There are rules for this, there are laws for this."

In this case, he said, the board has little choice.

Market reaction

The news hit the stock immediately. During regular trading on November 11, the shares had still gained $4.93, according to Shacknews. In after-hours trading they then dropped more than 7 percent; TechCrunch puts the figure at around 8 percent. Over the previous five days, TechCrunch says the losses add up to about 11 percent. Superpower Daily points out, however, that this period also includes trading days before the WSJ report. So the 11 percent doesn't reflect the reaction to the ouster plans alone.

AppleInsider writes that more than $800 billion in market value was wiped out in a single day after the first affair became public, and that uncertainty over the company's leadership has weighed on the stock ever since. The outlet also places the slide in the context of a generally weaker mood: investors have recently grown more skeptical that the AI business will pay off in the long run.

A company built around one person

Nvidia's real problem is succession. Huang co-founded the company in 1993 and has run it for 33 years. According to Fortune, he has built an unusually flat structure that puts him at the center of most decisions. Around 60 executives report directly to him. Nvidia has no chief operating officer (COO), meaning there's no second-in-command who could take over day-to-day operations. The board has no chair, and there is no clear succession plan. Fortune says Huang is known for personally texting or calling even small customers. TechCrunch describes him as someone who rarely delegates.

Analysts don't think the risk is that Nvidia's engineers would suddenly be unable to build chips without Huang. The real question, according to Fortune, is whether anyone can inherit his authority: deciding what gets built, rallying the industry behind it and convincing customers to take the next big leap. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told Fortune that the circumstances of Huang's expected removal

"accelerate a transition the company is not prepared for."

Michael Useem, a management professor at the Wharton School, said a board has rarely been under this much pressure. If it had done its job, he said, a list of potential successors would have been ready long ago.

According to Fortune, business and legal experts name CFO Colette Kress and Stephen Neal as possible interim options. Neal is the lead independent director, meaning the senior independent member of the board, and chairman emeritus of the law firm Cooley. Fortune also notes that Huang's children and his son-in-law work at Nvidia.

The numbers at stake

The latest financial results, compiled by Fortune, show how much is on the line:

Nvidia's graphics processors (GPUs), chips that can run huge numbers of calculations in parallel, are the standard for training AI models and for inference, the ongoing work of answering user requests to chatbots. That makes Nvidia one of the biggest winners of the AI boom.

The political angle

Then there's politics. US President Trump is considered a close friend of Huang's and, according to Fortune, has backed him since Sunday, calling him a "great guy" and an "honorable man." At the same time, the alleged spy connection raises the question of whether security-sensitive information was leaked. The board has denied this so far, but the investigation is still ongoing.

The big picture

If the board really does remove Huang, it would be one of the biggest leadership changes in tech history. The fallout would reach well beyond Nvidia. Virtually every major AI lab, from OpenAI to Google to Meta, depends on Nvidia hardware, and Huang has been the face and the strategist behind that dependence. In the short term, little is likely to change for customers. Goldberg stresses that Nvidia is sold out and contractually committed well into next year. But he warns:

"It loses a lot of its luster. The likelihood of a misstep is higher."

Much remains unclear. All reports about the ouster plans rely on anonymous sources, and neither Nvidia nor Huang has confirmed them. It's also unclear what the investigation into the alleged espionage affair will find, and who would take over the company. What is certain: a company with more than $200 billion in annual revenue has no visible succession plan, and the episode shows just how much Nvidia revolves around a single person.