MSC Irina
MSC · Container · In service · built by Yangzijiang
MSC Irina holds the record every container line has chased for twenty years: the highest nominal capacity ever put on one hull, 24,346 TEU.
Derived metrics
Computed by ships.fyi from the core specification — see how we calculate these.
How big is it, really?
The MSC Irina's length overall, against things you already know the size of.
The 747-8 bar is the longest airliner ever built — our sibling site aircraft.fyi measures everything that flies the same way.
One MSC Irina = 1.49 Titanics · 3.8 football pitches · 16 blue whales · 5.2 Boeing 747-8s laid end to end.
The numbers
| Length overall | 399.9 m |
|---|---|
| Beam | 61.3 m |
| Capacity | 24,346 TEU — world record |
| Deadweight | ≈240,000 t |
| Container tiers | up to 26 high |
| Delivered | March 2023 |
| Flag | Liberia |
Put the MSC Irina next to something
Last verified: 2026-07-15 · Spot an error? business@luck.fyi
What makes it different
MSC Irina is the current answer to a question the container industry has asked since 2006: how many boxes can one ship carry? Her nominal 24,346 TEU — stacked up to 26 tiers high — took the world record in 2023 by roughly 150 TEU over OOCL Spain, and as of mid-2026 it still stands.
The margin tells its own story. The top of the table is now separated by rounding errors because the designs have converged on the same wall: about 400 metres of length and 61.5 metres of beam, the practical ceiling set by the Suez Canal, berth lengths and the reach of the world's biggest cranes. Ships stopped growing outward and started packing smarter — Irina's record came from stacking height and hull-form efficiency, including an air-lubrication system bubbling friction away under the hull.
She was built by Yangzijiang, the largest private shipbuilder in China, for MSC — the family-owned Geneva giant that, in the same stretch of years, overtook Maersk to become the world's largest container line and, by 2026, the first to operate a thousand ships. Irina is the flagship-by-numbers of the largest fleet ever assembled.
The MSC Irina line
Irina class
Who operates the MSC Irina
All 1 operator of record, verified 2026-07-15. Figures marked ≈ are approximate.
MSCMSCAsia–Europe service for the world's largest container line.1✓→