News #202634 -Data-centre boom drives air cargo growth - and widens imbalances

Data-centre investment is reshaping trade flows and putting new pressure on the industry's capacity balance, with hi-tech now the main engine of air cargo growth, according to consultancy Aevean.

Aevean data shows hi-tech air trade reached 3m tonnes in the first seven months of 2026, compared with 2.8m tonnes for Chinese ecommerce. Hi-tech volumes were up 22% year on year, while the wider global air cargo market grew 5.8%.

"The cream on top is really the hi-tech," Maarten Wormer, head of consulting at Aevean, told The Loadstar on the sidelines of Aviation Connect in Athens.

The shift is being driven by data-centre investment, with shipments of servers, networking equipment and other hi-tech products generating particularly strong transpacific demand.

In March, hi-tech air imports reached about 160,000 tonnes, up 80% year on year - equivalent to 52 widebody freighter flights a day.

While the initial wave of data-centre construction could eventually ease, Mr Wormer said the replacement cycle for equipment could provide a longer-term source of demand.

"The servers there run out in like two to three years," he said. "Then they're completely written off."

The geographical pattern of that demand is also changing. US hi-tech air imports from Taiwan rose 98% year on year in January-July, while Thailand increased 155%. Vietnam was up 64%, Malaysia 54% and South Korea 88%. Chinese volumes, by contrast, fell 9%.

The growth from countries outside China was equivalent to about six additional widebody freighter flights a day.

But the data-centre boom is also reinforcing one of air cargo's structural problems: imbalanced flows.

The ecommerce boom created heavy westbound flows from China into Europe and the US, with comparatively little cargo moving back to Asia. The emerging hi-tech trade is producing a similar pattern, with large volumes of equipment moving out of Southeast Asia and other Asian production centres towards the US and Europe, but relatively little cargo returning on those lanes.

Australia is another emerging destination, with its combination of available land and renewable energy resources supporting investment in data centres and creating another market for the hi-tech equipment flowing out of Asia.

For air cargo, that means a growing eastbound lane into Australia - but, as with the US and European flows, the question is what will fill the aircraft on the return journey.

"The imbalances have widened," said Mr Wormer, and warned that the problem could become more pronounced as additional freighter capacity enters the market.

He explained that Middle Eastern carriers are expected to gain the bulk of new freighter capacity this year, despite much of the strongest hi-tech demand flowing east from Asia towards the US and other destinations.

That creates what Mr Wormer described as a "third dimension to the imbalance".

Not only are cargo flows uneven, he explained, but capacity is also being added in a part of the world that may not directly match where the strongest demand is emerging.

At the same time, China's ecommerce air freight into Europe is contracting sharply. August volumes to major European gateways fell 70% in Hungary, 61% in France and 53% in Belgium, according to Aevean.

Source: https://theloadstar.com/data-centre-boom-drives-air-cargo-growth-and-widens-imbalances/

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