According to data from the US Census Bureau, the still-ongoing 2026 Transpacific container shipping peak season is not being driven by the boom in investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and is instead being actively fuelled by traditional consumer goods.Figure 1 shows the monthly Asia to US containerized imports in Metric Tons for January 2022 to September 2026, broken down into seven major categories. We mapped all HS8 codes in the data to five traditional container goods classification groups (A E) and created two new groups (F G). We do not claim that all goods transported under the F-G classifications are being used to build AI data centres, but that they could conceivably be contributing to it.
The data shows that high value AI computer chips and IT equipment does not travel by ocean freight and is almost exclusively shipped by airfreight. Furthermore, when looking at the physical materials needed to build these massive data centres, the numbers show no significant impact on Asia-US volumes. The data shows that the import weight for data centre construction materials and infrastructure has remained almost completely flat. If the AI boom were truly driving Transpacific container volumes, we would expect to see an increase here. (....)