Jensen Huang was having a third affair, Reuters reports

Reuters reported Thursday that the former Nvidia CEO had a separate, previously unreported affair with a company employee. Reuters is withholding her name. The report 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.

This is now the third relationship in the story. The first, with Alice Huang, an accused spy who runs a Singapore firm under investigation, drives the national security concern. The second was with Nvidia's vice president of health care, Kimberly Powell. A third tied to an employee pushes this further into workplace power and board oversight.

We've been careful on this story about separating private conduct from public stakes. A CEO's personal life usually isn't our beat. This one is because the first relationship sits at the center of an export control and espionage question, and because the last two involve people inside the company he ran.

That's the part I keep coming back to. When a chief executive has relationships with subordinates, the issue isn't morality. It's leverage, fairness and whether anyone could say no. Employees around those relationships 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.

We should also be honest about what we don't know. Reuters hasn't named the employee, and the TechCrunch report gives no detail on timing, seniority or whether the relationship broke any policy. We won't fill those gaps with speculation. The likelier read is that more reporting is coming, and that the board's internal investigation now has a wider brief than it started with.

For the AI industry, the stakes are bigger than one man. 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 national security side of the Alice Huang relationship. Each new disclosure makes that hearing harder and makes it harder for the company to argue this was one lapse in judgment.

Our position stays where it was. The useful question isn't who he slept with. It's whether the company that controls the most important hardware in AI had controls strong enough to catch problems at the very top. So far, the record suggests it didn't.

He resigned Thursday as CEO and board member after reports of affairs with Alice Huang, who is not related to him, and with Kimberly Powell. Colette Kress, Nvidia's CFO, is interim CEO. Lawmakers have called him to testify about the national security implications of the Alice Huang relationship.