AI goods drive uneven trade growth
A social post sharing McKinsey commentary highlights that a single category — AI‑related goods — is powering outsized, uneven growth in trade patterns as industries reconfigure (x.com). The post frames that concentration as a structural change in global trade flows tied to AI investment and deployment (x.com).
Artificial intelligence hardware is now doing an outsized share of the work in global trade growth, with semiconductors and data-center equipment accounting for about one-third of the increase in 2025. (mckinsey.com) McKinsey said on March 19, 2026 that global trade still grew faster than the world economy in 2025, even as tariffs and geopolitical tensions reshaped who buys from whom. Its report said Taiwan, South Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia supplied much of the chip and server demand, especially to the United States. (mckinsey.com) The World Trade Organization found a similar concentration earlier in the cycle. In the first half of 2025, AI-related goods drove 43% of global merchandise-trade growth, and the WTO raised its full-year goods-trade forecast to 2.4% from 0.9% in August 2025. (pymnts.com) Those goods are mostly the physical inputs needed to build artificial intelligence systems: semiconductors, processors, servers, telecommunications equipment, and other components that go into data centers and cloud networks. The WTO’s 2025 trade report said it tracked roughly 100 product lines tied to AI-enabling goods. (data.wto.org) The demand is being pulled by a construction wave in computing infrastructure. A Federal Reserve note published on February 13, 2026 said rising data-center construction has lifted demand for critical inputs and intermediate goods since early 2025, and said U.S. data-center spending alone was expected to exceed $500 billion in 2025. (federalreserve.gov) The gains are uneven across countries because the supply chain is concentrated. McKinsey said Asian hubs captured much of the export upside, while China expanded shipments of industrial components and capital goods to fast-growing manufacturing economies. (mckinsey.com) At the same time, the United States is the main destination for much of that buildout. McKinsey said the U.S. added roughly half of the world’s new data-center capacity in 2025, helping pull in more imports of chips, graphics processors, routers, and servers. (scmp.com) This is happening alongside a broader rerouting of trade. McKinsey said U.S.-China trade fell by around 30% in 2025, while the United States replaced about two-thirds of that gap with imports from other sellers and Southeast Asia increased trade with both economies. (mckinsey.com) The longer-range forecast points to more concentration, not less. McKinsey said global trade could reach $42 trillion to $45 trillion by 2035, but as much as $14 trillion of that trade could shift from one corridor to another as companies rework sourcing around geopolitics and “future-shaping industries” such as AI. (mckinsey.com) The open question is whether the AI trade surge spreads beyond the economies that already make the hardware. The WTO’s 2025 report said AI can widen trade and productivity gains, but unequal access to digital infrastructure, skills, and computing capacity could leave those gains concentrated in a smaller group of countries. (wto.org)
