time velocity 🇺🇸

Why Freight Rates Are Soaring, and What the Shipyard Boom Means for Investors usfunds.com/resource/why-fre… via @USFunds

This July article laid out how Singapore, Johor's data-center belt, and other third-country hubs have become a corridor around US chip export controls: cloud rentals, transshipment, and corporate structures that obscure the end user. It did not name a company. The firm now in the headlines is Megaspeed, a Singapore-based Nvidia cloud partner. In December 2025, Bloomberg reported that the US was investigating its ownership and whether chips were diverted to China. Bloomberg and later C4ADS have described Megaspeed International as the largest Southeast Asian importer of Nvidia hardware, with about $4.6 billion in imports from 2022 to 2025. Megaspeed denies wrongdoing. It says inspections by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, Malaysia's trade ministry, and Nvidia found no illicit transfers. There are still no public court charges. Operators still need to know who the end user is, and who pays for the power and the inbound freight. xitter.twitterapi.xyz/time0149/status/207923…

The freight side matches. Expeditors said its airfreight tonnage grew 19% in September, and computer and server orders are up 27%, the fastest since 1997. A lot of that gear moves by air, so watch air cargo rates into December. xitter.twitterapi.xyz/KobeissiLetter/status/…

When a hyperscaler pledges to pay for 100% of the power it uses, ask what that covers besides the electrons. Google just wrote that pledge onto a $17 billion Wyoming campus. On November 5, Google said this will be its first data center in Wyoming, in Laramie County. It also said it will pay for 100% of the power it uses and cover the infrastructure needs directly driven by its growth. That second sentence is what operators should pin down. The announcement leaves open whether the cover reaches interconnects, transmission upgrades, and new generation built to serve the campus, or only the power Google itself consumes. The campus will be air-cooled, which Google says will ease strain on local water. Power is planned from 702 MW of Bloom fuel cells, made in America and contracted through AEP, with carbon storage at Tallgrass’s Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub, plus gas generators run by Tallgrass Energy and Black Hills Energy. If you quote rates or plan inbound freight to a site like this, map the pledge to a line item. What does “100% of the power” include, what does “infrastructure driven by its growth” leave out, and who pays when the grid work runs long?

Air Cargo This Week, Oct 26: peak season is here. China to US spot jumped 19% in a week to $6.88/kg, jet fuel hit $196.70 a barrel (118.5% above a year ago), and Taiwan saw nearly 100 US charters in September to collect AI servers. What it means for pallets and crates:

Try it here (free Grok Bot app; install it, then this link opens the Human Voice Editor): x.ai/bot