The Wall Street Journal's coverage of the AI data center buildout flags a supply chain squeeze most people miss. Builders racing hyperscaler deadlines are flying in equipment that used to travel by ship. Cooling gear and backup power equipment now ride alongside servers and GPUs on the same cargo planes.
Trans-Pacific high-tech air cargo into the US grew 70 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026, according to aviation consultancy Aevean. Volume reached roughly 401,000 tonnes. Overall US air imports rose just 11 percent in the same quarter, and ecommerce volume fell 11 percent. Trade publication Journal of Commerce has tracked the same shift. It names large-scale air conditioning units, diesel generators, and transformers among the heavy-lift cargo moving into US data center sites.
Morrison Express Group CEO Asok Kumar said customers are booking air cargo capacity as far out as 2028. Some expect the crunch to run through 2030. Chip makers, chip-equipment suppliers, and CPU manufacturers are booking the same freighters as construction crews. Switchgear procurement already sits on a project's critical path. Airfreight has become the tool builders use to protect a commissioning date when a shipment runs late.
The bottleneck predates the airfreight surge. Substation transformer lead times stretched from roughly 140 weeks in 2023 to more than 160 weeks in 2026. High-power transformers that once shipped in 24 to 30 months now carry waits as long as five years, Bloomberg reported. Cooling equipment draws from many of the same overseas factories and competes for the same freighter space. This cooling supply chain guide covers the overlap in more detail. DHL Group responded in March 2026 by opening 10 new North American facilities. It added more than 7 million square feet of warehouse space built for high-value IT and power equipment, including cooling systems.
That should worry cooling teams as much as electrical teams. CDUs, chillers, and prefabricated liquid cooling skids run on the same 12 to 18 month lead times as generators and switchgear. They come from the same overseas plants now competing for freighter space with GPUs and transformers. A chiller delivery running a few weeks late now gets fixed with an air cargo invoice. The same pressure is already reshaping cooling hardware procurement under tariff exposure. Expect operators to budget air freight premiums into cooling contracts as a routine cost of holding the schedule.