Construction tied to artificial intelligence data centers is absorbing a growing share of specialized flatbed trucking capacity in the United States, driving rates higher for traditional commodity shippers even as overall freight volumes soften, according to Blake Azell, vice president of customer success and support at IntelliTrans, a Roper Technologies company. Azell said the flatbed and specialized freight market moving chemicals, plastics, building materials and metals is now competing directly with hyperscale technology companies for the same limited pool of trucks and drivers.
Azell estimated hyperscalers are spending roughly $700 billion on data center buildout, a pace comparable to the annual cost of the interstate highway system compressed into a two-week span. A single 500-megawatt data center requires an estimated 30,000 truckloads of concrete, steel, copper, fiber optic cable and generators to construct, and only about 8% of announced and contracted US data center projects are currently under any level of construction, pointing to years of sustained demand ahead.
The flatbed load-to-truck ratio has climbed to 73-to-1 even as overall freight volumes have eroded roughly 4% since 2023, a mismatch Azell attributed to structural rather than cyclical forces. He said the industry has lost an estimated 250,000 drivers since 2020 through retirement and regulatory attrition, further tightening capacity available to commodity shippers. Because data center developers are largely insensitive to rising freight costs, Azell said they can outbid traditional shippers for scarce flatbed capacity without financial strain. He recommended shippers abandon national rate averages in favor of lane-specific benchmarking, revisit contract rates with carriers and evaluate rail transload options where regional volumes support the shift.
Source: FreightWaves — https://www.freightwaves.com/news/the-capacity-tax-how-ai-data-centers-alter-freight-markets