Developing. As of 7:15 p.m. ET on Nov. 11, Nvidia's board had not announced a decision.

Nvidia's board is preparing to remove Jensen Huang, the co-founder who has run the company since 1993, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Directors could meet as soon as Wednesday night to decide his future.

Bloomberg reported that the board is meeting to discuss Huang's fate. The Financial Times said the talks were urgent.

Nvidia shares fell more than 9% at one point in after-hours trading, CNBC reported. They were down 7.4% at $160.95 as of 6:30 p.m. ET, according to Yahoo Finance. Tom's Hardware puts the stock's decline since the scandal began at about 20%.

The Journal's story came out shortly after The New York Times reported that Huang had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare. The Times cited five people who worked at the company and said Powell reported directly to Huang.

How we got here

The Times first tied Huang to a suspected Chinese intelligence operation on Oct. 29. It reported that U.S. agencies had concluded Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore data center company Megaspeed, was passing information to Beijing while staying close to Nvidia's CEO. She isn't related to him. Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer, had lined up about $2 billion in Nvidia hardware, and Washington was already looking into whether chips it bought were reaching China.

Officials believed Jensen Huang didn't know what she was allegedly up to, according to the Times, and the paper said President Trump was briefed last year and did nothing. Nvidia told The Hill that the earlier diversion claims about Megaspeed had been "thoroughly investigated and debunked." China's embassy called the allegations smears. Megaspeed said it had hired outside counsel. None of the espionage claims have been proven publicly.

On Sunday, Nov. 8, Nvidia's board said a committee of independent directors would oversee an investigation into reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. It hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for the job, CNBC reported. Huang admitted the affair to employees that day. "I was unfaithful to my wife," he wrote in a note to staff.

The Powell report changes the board's problem. The Alice Huang affair was a national security question about who had access to Nvidia's CEO. A relationship with someone who reported to him falls under the conduct rules any public company board already has on the books. Intel and McDonald's have both pushed out CEOs over relationships with employees.

Why it matters for AI

Most of the AI industry trains and runs its models on Nvidia chips. Huang has been the company's public face since its founding, and lately its lead voice in Washington on how much of that hardware can be sold to China. If the board removes him, someone else will have to do both jobs.

Nvidia has no succession plan in place, one analyst told Reuters. Whoever takes over will be the company's second CEO.

Analysts were turning cautious on the stock, too. Reuters reported that Baird downgraded Nvidia and that Morgan Stanley took it off its Top Pick list.

Interest on X jumped once the Journal story broke at about 2:30 p.m. PT. By our count, posts mentioning Huang along with "oust" or "board" went from about 76 in the 1 p.m. hour to roughly 5,000 in the 2 p.m. hour and about 6,600 in the 3 p.m. hour.

What we're watching

The board could vote tonight or wait for Wachtell to finish. It's unclear whether Huang would give up just the CEO job or his board seat as well, and nobody has said who would run the company in the meantime. Powell hasn't commented publicly. We'll update this story when the board acts.