As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to thrive, exports of AI-related products have surged, bringing a significant influx of new orders to the air freight industry in Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province.
From the construction of upstream computing power centers to the launch of downstream terminal hardware, orders for related manufacturing enterprises have surged.
At a storage device manufacturing company in the city's Longhua District, products are being shipped to Europe.
"Over 90 percent of our shipments go by air, because the products are high in value and compact in size. The weekly value of our shipments to Europe is around five million U.S. dollars," said Zhao Xu, deputy general manager of Shenzhen KingSpec Electronics Technology Co., Ltd.
According to Zhao, exports of high-speed solid-state drives for AI computers from his company have increased by nearly 180 percent since the start of the year.
Although air freight costs about three times as much as sea freight, it offers faster delivery. In the face of rapid iterations in AI terminal products, speed means market share and profits.
In the construction of computing power centers, which is a more upstream segment of the AI industry chain, customers place even higher demands on logistics efficiency.
"We just took on a project involving fiber optical cables and related materials for a data center. The client required delivery within one week. The shipment volume was enormous, and we had to charter a plane to handle it," said Jin Rui, vice president of air freight at Best Services International Freight Ltd.
Since the second half of 2025, Jin's freight forwarding company has handled a growing number of orders for AI-related products.
The industry has experienced further expansion this year, with logistics orders for AI products in the first half alone already surpassing the total for all of last year. Recently, new clients have been visiting almost every week.
"For optical module PCBs (printed circuit boards), upstream materials and semiconductors, export orders often require 50, 60 or even 90 pallets at a time," Jin said.
According to data from Changjiang Securities, from January to May this year, China's exports of cloud computing equipment and semiconductor equipment surged by 114.4 percent and 91.5 percent, respectively, year on year. The explosive growth in AI-related equipment exports has significantly boosted the air freight sector.
AI boom fuels air freight in south China as exports of related products soar
