Executives at large US trucking companies claim freight demand is finally on the rise, but have a hard time saying exactly what type of demand and how much.

Consumer demand is soft but steady and industrial demand is alive but muted. Freight demand is strongest, they say, in areas related to data center construction.

“What we saw in the second quarter was a pickup in manufacturing, which we hadn’t seen in a while,” Mario Harik, CEO of less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier XPO, told the Journal of Commerce Thursday. “We’re starting to see some industrial sectors build volume.”

Those sectors include electrical equipment manufacturing and chemical production, which is often a harbinger of future manufacturing activity. “We saw a pickup in shipments of equipment for agriculture, a pickup in heavy equipment overall,” Harik said.

Electrical equipment, including circuit breakers, cables, cords and wiring as well as heavy equipment are all indicative of demand for data centers that support artificial intelligence and cloud computing, which are in a massive multi-year rollout.

Despite growing local political opposition, investment in data centers continues to climb, with annualized spending on data center construction in the US eclipsing $50 billion for the first time in April, according to the US Census Bureau.

Still, LTL carriers such as XPO don’t see much data center demand directly — at least in the early phases of construction. “Most of the product they use are specialized and move by expedited or flatbed carriers,” Harik said. “But electrical components are strong.”

Shipment volumes rose 2.8% year over year at XPO in the second quarter and were up 6% in July. Weight per shipment also increased 6% in July.

“Anything tied to industrial freight and data centers continues to dominate the freight landscape,” Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, said during a Journal of Commerce webcast on the second-half trucking outlook Thursday.

“We’ve moved something like half a million loads already this year related to data centers,” Croke said. “That’s sucking capacity out of the dry-van, reefer and flatbed market. If you’ve got a truck spec’ed to do heavy-haul, that’s where the money is now.”

PMI watch

Carriers are watching every shift in Purchasing Managers’ Indexes (PMIs) to gauge the health of industrial shipping. Although both the S&P Global and Institute for Supply Management (ISM) PMIs are in positive territory, they’re not positive enough for some.

“It’s not like we’ve had ISM [PMI] knocking on the door of 60,” Adam Satterfield, CFO of Old Dominion Freight Line, said this week. “It hasn’t had a big breakout yet. There’s still room to run.” The ISM PMI registered 53.3 in June, while S&P’s PMI was 53.9.

Satterfield noted the recent drop in the US business inventory-to-sales ratio, which may indicate the need for greater restocking in the second half of this year or early 2027.

S&P, the parent company of the Journal of Commerce, noted that manufacturing activity cooled in July, with its PMI forecast to drop to 53.8 for the month. New orders in early July rose at the slowest pace in four months, S&P said in its July 24 Flash PMI forecast.

XPO’s Harik, however, says his customers are increasingly optimistic about the second half of 2026. In a second-quarter survey conducted by the company, “double the number of shippers said they expect an acceleration in the back half of the year from our previous survey,” Harik said.

Some of that acceleration represents pent-up demand, he said, noting the US is emerging from a period where “people were not deploying capital in the industrial economy.”

“That reduction of industrial capex is catching up with us in 2026,” Harik said.