According to The Loadstar, hi-tech air cargo volumes reached 3m tonnes in the first seven months of 2026, surpassing Chinese ecommerce air trade (2.8m tonnes) and growing 22% year on year — far outpacing the wider global air cargo market’s 5.8% growth.
Surge Driven by Transpacific Server Shipments
The surge is being fueled by data-centre construction, particularly shipments of servers, networking equipment, and related hardware across the Pacific. In March alone, hi-tech air imports totaled approximately 160,000 tonnes, an 80% increase year on year — equivalent to 52 widebody freighter flights a day. Maarten Wormer, head of consulting at Aevean, noted that this demand may persist beyond initial construction: “The servers there run out in like two to three years,” he said. “Then they’re completely written off.”
This replacement cycle implies sustained demand, as aging infrastructure requires continuous refreshment — not just one-time deployment.
Wormer added that the structural nature of this demand contrasts with more cyclical sectors, reinforcing long-term air cargo volume commitments from tech-driven logistics networks.
Geographic Shifts: Asia-Pacific Growth, China Decline
Demand geography is rapidly shifting away from mainland China. From January to July, US hi-tech air imports from Taiwan rose 98% year on year, Thailand increased 155%, Vietnam was up 64%, Malaysia 54%, and South Korea 88%. Meanwhile, Chinese volumes fell 9%. Collectively, growth from non-China Asian sources added the equivalent of about six additional widebody freighter flights a day.
Australia is emerging as another key destination, leveraging its land availability and renewable energy resources to attract data-centre investment — generating new eastbound air cargo lanes from Asia.
Yet those routes face the same imbalance problem: minimal return cargo, especially on flights from Southeast Asia to the US, Europe, and Australia.
Widening Imbalance and Capacity Mismatch
“The imbalances have widened,” said Wormer, warning that the problem could intensify as new freighter capacity enters service. Middle Eastern carriers are expected to absorb the bulk of new freighter additions this year — despite strongest hi-tech demand flowing eastward from Asia toward the US and other Western markets. This misalignment creates what Wormer described as a “third dimension to the imbalance”: uneven cargo flows and mismatched capacity deployment.
Compounding the pressure, Chinese ecommerce air freight into Europe is collapsing: August volumes dropped 70% in Hungary, 61% in France, and 53% in Belgium, according to Aevean.
With westbound ecommerce flows receding and eastbound hi-tech flows surging — both heavily unidirectional — the air cargo industry faces mounting operational and economic strain on backhaul utilization.
Source: The Loadstar
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
