华尔街在你的401(k)计划中隐藏的人工智能崩溃

The private credit market, an opaque $1.8 trillion shadow banking sector built on the premise of bulletproof yields, is cracking. But this isn’t a story about institutional losses. It is a story about how retail investors, 401(k) plans, and pensions became the exit liquidity for a software debt crisis triggered by the artificial intelligence revolution.

In mid-February 2026, Blue Owl Capital Corporation II (OBDC II), a $1.6 billion unlisted private credit vehicle, permanently halted quarterly redemptions. The fund had been battered by a massive surge in withdrawal requests totaling approximately 15 percent of its net asset value (the total worth of the fund’s holdings), triple the amount they were contractually obligated to honor. This is not a minor administrative change; it is the financial equivalent of gating the exits while the building is smoking.

The smoke originates from a specific, toxic mixture in these specific vehicles. Highly leveraged loans were given to legacy software companies that are now facing an existential threat from generative artificial intelligence. Mainstream finance focuses on the macro environment of interest rates and Federal Reserve policies. But the root cause here is technological disruption.

The Software Subsidy Machine

To understand why this is happening now, analysts look back at the zero-interest-rate phenomenon. During the 2010s and early 2020s, “software eating the world” was not just a mantra; it was a guaranteed business model. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, like Zendesk, Anaplan, and PowerSchool, grew rapidly on the back of cheap money. They did not need to be immediately profitable; they just needed to grow subscriptions to justify higher valuations.

When traditional banks retreated from lending to these deeply indebted tech firms, private credit stepped in. Private equity firms and alternative asset managers created Business Development Companies (BDCs)—corporate vehicles effectively designed to let regular investors buy into private debt—to funnel capital to these mid-market software companies. These loans were highly lucrative for the originators, generating massive upfront fees.

By early 2026, an estimated 20 percent to 27 percent of the entire private credit market (hundreds of billions of dollars) was tied up in technology and software exposure.

The Illusion of Safety

These loans were sold to investors as “senior secured debt,” meaning the lenders are first in line to get paid back if a company goes bankrupt. The pitch to retail investors was intoxicating: consistent 9 percent to 11 percent yields, low reported volatility, and the illusion of safety because the loans did not trade on public markets. This was often achieved through non-traded BDCs pushed by wealth advisors and integrated into retirement platforms.

But the loans were highly leveraged. Many of these software companies were operating with Debt-to-EBITDA ratios (their total borrowing compared to their raw cash profit) of 6x or higher. They were “asset-light,” meaning the collateral backing these massive loans was not real estate or factories. The collateral was intellectual property, customer lists, and the presumption of recurring revenue.

The AI Margin Collapse

Then came the widespread commercialization of advanced AI models in 2024 and 2025. By early 2026, tools like Anthropic’s Claude Cowork and customized enterprise agentic frameworks shifted from experimental oddities to operational necessities.

The disruption was brutal and swift for thousands of mid-market SaaS companies:

1. The Commoditization of Features: A legacy SaaS company charging $50 per month per user for workflow automation suddenly found itself competing with an open-source AI model that could orchestrate the same workflows for pennies.
2. The Collapse of the Moat: The intellectual property backing those private credit loans degraded overnight. If a company’s software logic can be replicated by three engineers and an API key over a weekend, its enterprise value plummets. Legacy players are burdened by high technical debt and siloed data structures that make pivoting incredibly costly.
3. The Margin Squeeze: Facing massive churn from customers moving to AI-native alternatives, these legacy software companies had to slash prices or attempt costly pivots. Both options destroy cash flow, exactly when debt servicing costs are highest.

As cash flow vaporized, the highly leveraged software companies could no longer service their debt.

The Thermal Physics of the Collapse

The software crisis is intrinsically linked to the underlying physics of cloud computing. The AI pivot requires a massive leap in cooling capacity.

Legacy enterprise software operations rely heavily on traditional CPU-based data center servers. These servers calculate linearly and consume predictable amounts of energy. However, training and running inference for generative AI models requires GPU clusters, such as interconnected racks of Nvidia Blackwell architecture.

A standard data center rack cooling system is designed to handle roughly 10 kilowatts (kW) to 15 kW of heat dispersal. An AI-optimized GPU rack approaches 120 kW of heat. The physics of air cooling fail at this density, requiring direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems. Building this infrastructure is staggeringly expensive. Building out new data centers that are capable of even housing this new hardware is even more expensive, let alone the power requirements needed to keep them active.

The private credit software borrowers simply do not have the capital to build these facilities. They are trapped running inefficient legacy code on rented AWS or Azure CPU instances, while their competitors lean on specialized GPU compute that the legacy borrowers cannot afford because their cash flow is entirely consumed by servicing their massive private credit debt. It is a death spiral driven by raw thermal constraints as much as economics. Even if they had the cash on hand to purchase the GPUs, the backlog for securing power agreements and data center floorspace means they are years behind the curve. They are effectively blockaded from the infrastructure required to survive.

The “Extend and Pretend” Trap

When a borrower cannot pay the interest on a massive private credit loan, the lender faces a clear choice. They can force a default and take an immediate, brutal loss on their own books, or they can negotiate an extension.

In the opaque world of private credit, lenders overwhelmingly choose the latter.

The Mechanics of PIK

The primary mechanism for this cover-up is the Payment-in-Kind (PIK) arrangement—effectively a financial IOU. Instead of paying cash interest, the borrower is allowed to simply add the missed interest payment to the principal balance of the loan.

If a company owes $100 million at 10 percent interest but cannot find $10 million in cash, the lender agrees to say the company now owes $110 million.

This creates the “zombie equilibrium.” PIK toggles act as a financial painkiller, masking the symptoms of insolvency. The borrower gets breathing room, and crucially, the lender avoids marking down the value of the loan on their balance sheet.

By late 2025, public and private BDCs reported that PIK income (which is literally just an accounting entry, not actual cash generated) was comprising 8 percent to 15 percent of their total investment income in stressed portfolios.

They are lending companies money to pay themselves the interest they are owed, while telling the investor that the asset is performing beautifully.

The CLO Contagion Risk

The risk does not stop at direct BDCs. Many of these software loans are bundled into Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs). These complex financial instruments mash hundreds of loans together and slice them into “tranches” (categories) of varying risk. The highest-rated AAA tranches are sold to conservative pension funds and insurance companies, while the riskier equity tranches are retained by hedge funds or the BDCs themselves.

If the underlying software loans begin to default en masse, the cash flows supporting the entire CLO structure collapse. Because private credit loans are illiquid and rarely trade on secondary markets, pricing these CLOs in a panic becomes impossible. The opacity that protected the BDC valuations in a bull market guarantees a chaotic, disorderly unwind in a crisis, echoing the securitization failures of 2008.

The Retail Dump

This is where the structure of the market turns predatory. Private credit managers recognized the rot in the software portfolios long before the retail investors did.

For years, the industry aggressively marketed private credit to “democratize” alternative investments. They launched non-traded perpetual BDCs, aggressively targeting retail wealth channels, 401(k) adjacent platforms, and smaller pension funds. Regulatory capture played a crucial role here, with intense lobbying efforts aimed at softening SEC accredited investor definitions and pushing the Department of Labor to allow private capital into standard retirement accounts.

The pitch was structured liquidity. Investors were told they could get reliable high yields, and they could withdraw up to 5 percent of the fund’s total value per quarter if they needed capital.

But structurally, non-traded BDCs suffer from a fatal liquidity mismatch. They are offering semi-liquid redemptions to retail investors while holding entirely illiquid, heavily PIK-laden loans tied to distressed software companies.

The Blue Owl Canary

The events of mid-February 2026 exposed the fragility of this system.

Blue Owl Capital, an absolute titan in the space, saw redemption requests for its unlisted OBDC II fund spike to roughly 15 percent of NAV, three times the allowable limit. Investors were spooked by the increasing noise around AI software disruption and broader market unease, and they wanted their cash.

But the BDC could not sell the underlying software loans to meet those redemptions without taking massive losses, because the secondary market knew the loans were impaired by the AI shift.

The Maneuver: On February 18, 2026, Blue Owl announced a complex $1.4 billion asset sale. Crucially, they sold the high-quality, performing loans (at roughly 99.7 cents on the dollar) to a consortium of institutional buyers, pension funds, and affiliates.

The Result: Retail investors were left holding the bag in OBDC II. The vehicle permanently ended its quarterly redemption policy. Investors are now trapped in a run-off structure, receiving sporadic distributions primarily sourced from whatever is left in the portfolio. That remaining portfolio is a concentrated pool of riskier assets, heavily exposed to the exact software companies currently being decimated by AI.

The Systemic Threat

The U.S. private credit default rate hit 5.8 percent in January 2026, a continued upward march from the previous year according to Fitch Ratings. But even that 5.8 percent figure is an illusion, artificially suppressed by the rampant use of PIK toggles and opaque, self-reported valuations.

The real danger is not that a few mid-market SaaS companies go bankrupt. The danger is that the $1.8 trillion private credit market relies on an assumption of continuous cash flow to support the massive fees extracted by asset managers.

When an entire sector of legacy software faces an existential technological shock from AI, the cash flow stops. The PIK accounting tricks delay the reckoning, but they compound the final loss. The principal balances of these zombie loans are swelling precisely as the enterprise value of the companies backing them approaches zero.

If an investor has a 401(k) with exposure to “alternative yield” funds, BDCs, or structured credit vehicles added during the recent push to “democratize” private equity, they are serving as the exit liquidity. They are holding the debt of zombie software companies that are statistically unlikely to survive the next two years of AI advancement, while the asset managers gate the exits and collect their 2 percent management fees on the inflated, un-marked-down valuations.

The AI crisis did not start in the stock market. It started deep in the private debt ledgers, and Wall Street made sure retail investors were the ones left holding the risk.