Why Is the World's Most Valuable Company Betting on Healthcare? | NVIDIA's Kimberly Powell

What is the world's most valuable company, best known for making computer chips, doing in healthcare? Quite a lot, it turns out. NVIDIA's technology is helping power everything from medical imaging and drug discovery to AI-powered hospitals and surgical robotics.

This week, Michael Esquivel and guest co-host Megan Zweig sit down with Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's Vice President of Healthcare, who has spent 18 years (!!!) building the company's healthcare business from the ground up. They discuss how NVIDIA became such an important player in healthcare, why AI adoption is accelerating faster than expected, and Powell's ambitious vision for a future where hospitals themselves operate like robots.

We cover:

• Why 2026 was the year AI finally became useful in healthcare
• What's driving the surprisingly rapid adoption of AI by hospitals and clinicians
• How NVIDIA is helping advance drug discovery and clinical trials
• Why the hospital of the future could operate like a robot
• The next frontier of physical AI, from autonomous wheelchairs to robotic surgery

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About our guest:

Kimberly Powell is the Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA where she spearheads the company's global healthcare product development initiatives in accelerated computing and generative AI platforms for the healthcare and life sciences sectors. Kimberly also leads go-to-market strategies and business development, collaborating and partnering with a global ecosystem to develop innovative applications in drug discovery, genomics, medical devices, and robotic surgery.

Before her current position, Powell was Director of Business Development for AI at NVIDIA, where she led an international team focused on expanding into new markets in deep learning, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. She was responsible for identifying new revenue opportunities, defining product market requirements, and launching several strategic evangelism programs such as NVIDIA AI Labs and the NVIDIA Inception program, which now supports over 20,000 AI startup members.

Powell's journey with NVIDIA began in 2008 when she took on the challenge of establishing NVIDIA GPUs as the leading accelerator platform for medical imaging instruments. Her early career involved hardware engineering and FPGA design and product management roles in medical imaging and diagnostic display systems at Planar Systems.

Kimberly Powell holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northeastern University.

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