Private credit was supposed to be the safer corner of the lending world. No daily price swings. No public-market panic. No bank run headlines. Just negotiated loans, floating-rate income, and patient capital earning steady returns while traditional banks pulled back.

Now the same features that made private credit attractive are becoming the reason investors are nervous.

Europe thought it had solved its energy crisis. Storage was full. LNG terminals were busy. Governments had rewritten emergency plans. Consumers had reduced demand. Traders moved on to oil, rates, AI, and geopolitics.

Now natural gas is back on the desk.

The semiconductor market is celebrating one of the greatest demand booms in modern technology history. AI servers are being ordered faster than suppliers can build them. Data centers are signing multi-year contracts. Graphics processors have become geopolitical assets. Every earnings call now contains some version of the same phrase: demand exceeds supply.

But beneath the AI euphoria, a quieter problem is spreading through the rest of the chip economy.