Jensen Huang's departure as Nvidia CEO is spurring investors to rethink the financial ties between the chip behemoth and some of the most heavily indebted AI entities.

Why it matters: Nvidia's role in the AI boom isn't limited to producing its highly sought-after GPUs (graphics processing units).

• It has also extended its vast financial resources to support a range of companies involved in the infrastructure boom.

Between the lines: Some of those same companies have now begun to slump in sympathy with Nvidia as the markets price in the new reality that whoever is ultimately tapped to lead the company will have far less flexibility when it comes to notching such unorthodox deals.

• Key man risk appears to be an issue for the companies in Nvidia's orbit as much as it is for Nvidia itself.
• "We believe that going forward, it may be more difficult for the company to negotiate new multi-party investments among ecosystem partners at the same scale it has done up to this point," Goldman Sachs analysts wrote yesterday.

The latest: Nvidia tumbled 4.3% yesterday. And stocks with unusual financial ties to Nvidia were caught in the vortex.

Case in point: CoreWeave, a company that builds data centers and sells access to its computing power, fell 6.9% yesterday.

• Nvidia is CoreWeave's second-largest shareholder, with a more than 12% stake.
• Nvidia has committed to spend $6.3 billion buying any unused computing capacity from CoreWeave through 2032.
• CoreWeave itself is a major customer of Nvidia's.

State of play: Other companies linked to Nvidia seemed to suffer for it.

• Intel — Nvidia's venture capital arm owns a 4% stake — declined 2%.
• Fiber-optic cable maker Lumentum — which received a $2 billion Nvidia infusion to support R&D and future capacity — slumped 3.6%.
• Neocloud Nebius—in which Nvidia said it would invest $2 billion back in March— plunged 16.8%. (A disappointing outlook from the company also played a role.)

Yes, but: There were also some obvious winners from Nvidia's woes.

• Foremost among them were rival chipmakers Broadcom and AMD, which both jumped 5.5% and 5.9%, respectively, yesterday, as the disruption for Nvidia could provide them their long-sought-after chance to snatch some market share from the company.

What they're saying: In a note, Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon cited the "considerable uncertainty" around "the ability of any new CEO to truly fill Jensen's shoes given how tightly he managed the direction of the business and its relationships with customers, suppliers, employees and the broader industry ecosystem."

• The key question for the companies in that ecosystem is whether Nvidia's new leadership ultimately continues providing such support.
• "If they believe that these kinds of companies are inherently important to the sustainability of Nvidia, then maybe the support does continue," said Johnathan Owen, a portfolio manager at TwentyFour Asset Management.
• "But I would argue that they probably aren't."

The bottom line: The trading indicates that at least some of that uncertainty is being felt outside Nvidia itself.

Businesses are spending billions of dollars to give workers access to AI tools — but most companies haven't yet figured out what to do after that, executives tell Axios.

Why it matters: Until they do, the miraculous economic growth promised by AI and its boosters could remain out of reach.

Behind the scenes: The key question now is: Can widespread individual adoption of AI actually translate into meaningful gains for an organization? At a recent private dinner Axios attended, HR executives debated the issue.

• One participant described inheriting a $10 million AI bill without a clear explanation of the value created.
• Entire workflows might need a redesign to really capture the opportunity on offer, other executives said.
• "Productivity is ultimately shaped by how people work together," notes a summary report of the evening, hosted by Charter.

Zoom in: "Almost every company's had this experience," says Brian Elliott, who is executive in residence at the workplace consulting firm.

• "Individuals report gains in productivity, but they're not seeing any results really from a company or or even parts of an organization perspective."
• AI has made writing code faster, he says, but hasn't sped up the process of figuring out what to do with it.

What to watch: CEOs are under increasing pressure from the boardroom to actually wring some value out of all their AI spend.

• And they're starting to push out executives they think aren't moving the needle, says Jeff Christian, CEO of executive recruiting firm Christian and Timbers.
• "We're seeing some companies replace 20% to 30% of their executive leadership team that can't make the jump into AI and drive the transformation that needs to occur."

What they're saying: "Some of the simplistic early views are that you just sort of somehow put technology inside of an organization and it creates a transformation," Rob Hornby, global co-CEO of AlixPartners, tells Axios. "But that's never happened, and it's not happening in AI either."

• He says the consulting firm is seeing an influx of business as companies try and figure out what to do with AI.
• "Almost every company in the world needs to do a substantive transformation. So it's a massive creator of demand."

Friction point: Companies are also holding off on major transformations out of security concerns. Banks worried about hacks — or being on the hook when a rogue agent uses a customer's account to buy something the customer doesn't want — for example.

• "Anyone who thinks they might be liable further down the chain is just stopping the activity," Hornby says.

State of play: It helps explain why AI isn't yet clearly showing up in the overall productivity numbers, as Axios' Courtenay Brown recently reported.

• In Anthropic's filing to go public, the frontier AI company called out the problem: "The natural resistance to change within organizations" is an obstacle to its growth.

Yes, but: In software engineering, there's little question AI had altered work and workflows.

The bottom line: AI may be moving fast, but companies are afraid to break things.