Air Cargo Volumes Defy Forecasts in June as Semiconductor and AI Hardware Demand Surges
Global air cargo demand rose 7% year-on-year in June, according to Xeneta data, a figure that came in well ahead of both analyst expectations and the market’s own supply growth of just 3%. The gap between demand and capacity has become the defining feature of air freight in 2026, and the driver is no longer the e-commerce boom that powered the sector for the past two to three years. It is semiconductors and AI infrastructure.
The scale of the underlying chip demand explains why. Global semiconductor sales grew 106% year-on-year in April, the fastest growth rate the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics organization has recorded since it began tracking data in 1986. That growth has flowed directly into freight: the transpacific corridor is now the strongest air freight lane of the year, even as China-US volumes have weakened under tariff pressure. Dynamic load factor on Asia Pacific-North America routes hit 90% in May, a level industry analysts describe as close to the practical ceiling for the network, since not every scheduled flight is optimized for cargo capacity.
The regional picture sharpens the point. Taiwan, which manufactures the overwhelming majority of the world’s advanced chips, posted 15% real GDP growth in the first quarter, its fastest quarterly expansion in nearly five decades. Taiwan-US air cargo rates reached $7.02 per kilogram in May, up 24% year-on-year, while China-US rates climbed 46% to $5.86 per kilogram. South Korea’s two largest chipmakers now account for more than half the total value of the Seoul stock exchange after both roughly doubled or tripled this year. None of this reads like a cyclical freight bump. It reads like a hardware buildout running at a pace the logistics network was not sized for.
What makes June notable is not just the strength of the number but what it displaced. Chinese cross-border e-commerce exports fell 11% year-on-year in April, including a 33% drop in shipments to the United States, following US regulatory changes on low-value imports and tightening scrutiny in Europe. For most of 2024 and 2025, e-commerce was the engine of air cargo growth. That role has now passed to semiconductors and data-center hardware, and industry voices are blunt about the durability of the shift — one Xeneta analyst put it plainly: the era of e-commerce-powered air freight growth is over for now.
Spot rates tell a more complicated story than volumes alone. Global spot rates rose 38% year-on-year in June to an average of $3.40 per kilogram, but the pace of increase is decelerating — down from 41% growth in May — as Middle East disruption eases, Gulf hub capacity returns, and jet fuel prices retreat. That combination of strong demand growth alongside slowing rate growth suggests the market is absorbing the AI-driven volume surge more efficiently than it was even a few months ago, without the shock pricing that characterized earlier phases of the disruption.
The capacity math is the real constraint going forward. Building new freighter capacity takes 18 to 24 months from order to delivery, meaning aircraft ordered today will not enter service until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest. Congestion at transshipment hubs — Bangkok, Manila, Suvarnabhumi, Kuala Lumpur — is already extending lead times independent of any single carrier’s decisions. Barring a sharp slowdown in AI infrastructure spending, the structural mismatch between semiconductor-driven demand and available freighter capacity looks likely to persist through the second half of 2026.