A third reported Huang relationship, with an Nvidia employee, widens the board’s problem

TechCrunch relays a Reuters report that the former Nvidia CEO had a separate, previously unreported affair with a company employee, whom Reuters isn’t naming. It landed the same day he stepped down as CEO and left the board, with finance chief Colette Kress stepping in as interim CEO and no permanent successor named (our resignation coverage).

That makes three reported relationships. The first, with Alice Huang, who is not related to him and runs a Singapore firm under investigation, is accused of being a spy and drives the national security concern. The second was with Nvidia’s vice president of health care, Kimberly Powell (our coverage). The third, with an employee, pushes the story further into workplace power and board oversight.

A CEO’s personal life usually isn’t newsworthy. This one is because the first relationship sits at the center of an export-control and espionage question (what China could gain), and because the other two involve people inside the company he ran.

When a chief executive has relationships with subordinates, the issue is leverage, fairness and whether anyone could say no, not morality. Colleagues have reason to wonder whether promotions, budgets and access were decided on merit. A board that didn’t know, or knew and didn’t act, has a problem regardless of what Congress finds. Nvidia never said publicly how it would replace him (our analysis), which suggests key-person risk was never seriously managed.

Reuters hasn’t named the employee, and the report gives no detail on timing, seniority or whether the relationship broke any policy. Those gaps shouldn’t be filled with speculation. More reporting is likely, and the board’s internal investigation now has a wider brief than it started with. His earlier memo to staff confessed the personal failure in full while handling the national security question more briefly (full text and analysis).

Nvidia sells the chips nearly every major lab depends on, and its leadership shapes how export rules are negotiated in Washington. Congress has called him to testify in the coming weeks about the Alice Huang relationship (the inquiry). Each disclosure makes that hearing harder and makes it harder to argue this was a single lapse. The useful question isn’t who he had relationships with. It is whether the company controlling AI’s most important hardware had controls strong enough to catch problems at the very top. So far, the record suggests it didn’t. For the full sequence, see our timeline. More in our NVIDIA coverage.