IN Brief:
- Transpacific volumes remain strong, with AI data-centre and power-generation equipment contributing to elevated North American import demand.
- Airfreight capacity, drayage, selected ocean lanes, chassis availability, and inland terminals are tightening despite softer domestic truck volumes.
- Peak-season planning increasingly depends on identifying constraints by mode, origin, and gateway rather than treating North American freight as one market.
Maersk is reporting tighter capacity across several North American freight markets as peak season develops, but the pressure is increasingly fragmented by transport mode, gateway, commodity, and region rather than reflecting a broad increase in every category of demand.
Transpacific imports remain strong despite typhoon disruption in Asia that has created backlogs expected to take several weeks to clear. Maersk identifies resilient retail demand alongside increasing volumes of AI data-centre and power-generation equipment as contributors to elevated cargo moving towards North America.
Technology freight is particularly important because the value and urgency of the cargo can affect how capacity is purchased. Semiconductors, server equipment, electronics, and components for power and data-centre infrastructure may justify premium transport where a late shipment could delay installation or prevent a larger project from being commissioned.
Ocean reliability is holding up comparatively well on the carrier’s Gemini services. Maersk cites Sea-Intelligence figures of 95.7% schedule reliability into the North American West Coast and 93.5% into the East Coast, compared with wider industry averages of 69.7% and 71.5% respectively.
That does not mean space is unconstrained. Typhoon-related disruption remains in the Asian origin network, while Golden Week will remove two transpacific sailings from the relevant Gemini services. A highly reliable network still has to absorb freight from cancelled departures and late inbound vessels.
The pressure is sharper in air cargo. IATA data cited in the update show North American demand increasing 4.8% year on year during July while available capacity fell 1.5%, with technology products accounting for significant demand from selected Asian origins.
Those figures demonstrate why logistics teams need to look below market-wide averages. Capacity may remain available on many international air routes while a small group of semiconductor or electronics gateways becomes increasingly difficult to book because several high-value supply chains depend on the same flights.
Airfreight planning therefore becomes a prioritisation exercise. Components capable of delaying production, commissioning, or customer delivery need different treatment from inventory that can spend another week in transit, particularly when premium capacity is both expensive and concentrated at particular origins.
Pressure continues when cargo reaches the ground. Maersk describes US drayage as tightening through a combination of frontloaded imports, higher diesel costs, chassis shortages, and reduced driver availability as qualification and safety requirements remove some capacity from the market.
New York and New Jersey, Southern California, and Florida are among the locations where greater pressure is expected. Accurate forecasting, container drops, faster equipment returns, and intermodal substitution can all increase the productivity of available trucks and chassis without adding vehicles to the fleet.
Rail capacity is described as broadly healthy, although selected markets are experiencing tighter railcar availability and inland hubs including Chicago, Atlanta, Fort Worth, and Memphis are expected to see elevated terminal dwell through September and early October.
That combination can create an awkward hand-off. A container may leave the port without difficulty only to spend additional time at an inland terminal if equipment or collection capacity is constrained, shifting the bottleneck rather than removing it.
Domestic road freight presents almost the opposite picture. Truck volumes declined during the summer even as rates continued to rise, indicating that supply-side changes are supporting pricing despite softer demand.
Carrier exits, driver qualification, operating costs, and greater selectivity over the freight accepted by hauliers can tighten effective capacity without any corresponding freight boom. For LTL users in particular, waiting for weaker volumes to translate automatically into cheaper transport may therefore prove optimistic.
Warehousing is similarly uneven. Maersk describes the overall market as stable but mixed, with companies concentrating on inventory control and flexibility rather than large network redesigns. Cold storage illustrates the point: national vacancy is around a two-decade high of roughly 7% to 7.7%, but much of that space sits in newer facilities while well-located established capacity remains comparatively tight.
A headline vacancy number is consequently of limited value to a shipper that needs temperature-controlled space beside a particular port or population centre. The wrong warehouse may technically be available while adding enough transport distance to make the option commercially unattractive.
Tariff changes add another variable because they influence when cargo moves as well as where it originates. Businesses can frontload imports ahead of a tariff date, change suppliers, redirect production through Mexico or Canada, or shift gateway use to manage landed cost, producing temporary freight surges that do not necessarily reflect underlying consumption.
Peak season is therefore becoming a collection of local capacity problems rather than one North American capacity problem. A company can face tight airfreight at an Asian semiconductor origin, find adequate ocean space, encounter chassis shortages at the destination port, and then move into a domestic trucking market with relatively soft freight volumes.
The practical response is to segment cargo by consequence and route. Critical components need protected capacity and alternative gateways; routine replenishment can use lower-cost options with more schedule tolerance; inland movements need contingency planning around the specific rail terminal, chassis pool, or driver market involved.
North American freight is not moving in one direction, and that is precisely what makes planning difficult. Demand can be strong in one mode while weak in another, while capacity can tighten independently of volume. The useful question for a shipper is no longer whether the market is tight, but where its own cargo is likely to encounter the first constraint.
