For most of the past decade, global trade growth has been explained by the usual suspects: consumer demand cycles, currency swings, tariff disputes. In 2025, that explanation changed. According to the World Trade Organization’s own data, a single category, AI-enabling goods, accounted for 42 percent of total global trade growth for the year, despite representing only about one-sixth of global trade overall. That is not a sector performing well. That is a sector functioning as the primary engine of an entire global system, and understanding how it got there says as much about the next decade of trade policy as it does about AI itself.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
The scale is not subtle. Trade in AI-enabling goods, semiconductors, servers, and data transmission equipment, rose 21.9 percent year-on-year in 2025, climbing to 4.18 trillion US dollars from 3.43 trillion the previous year. That surge helped push world merchandise trade volume up 4.6 percent for the year, a figure that outpaced the WTO’s own earlier projections. Notably, most of these AI-enabling products were exempt from the wave of new tariffs introduced through 2025, which meant that as trade-restrictive measures rattled other sectors, chips and semiconductors kept moving largely unobstructed. AI-related demand didn’t just contribute to trade growth in 2025. In the WTO’s own assessment, it offset the negative impact of tariffs and policy uncertainty that would otherwise have dragged growth down significantly.
Asia’s Advantage, and a Shifting Trade Map
The AI trade boom has not been evenly distributed. Asia’s export performance in AI-related products has been particularly strong, consistent with the broader global surge in AI infrastructure investment, while Africa and the Least Developed Countries have seen rapid import growth as they build out digital capacity. Meanwhile, North America, historically the centre of gravity for global trade demand, has seen slower growth, partly a function of frontloaded imports earlier in the tariff cycle finally normalising. The result is a trade map that looks less like the pre-2020 world and more like one organised around who supplies, and who needs, the physical infrastructure of AI.
Why 2026 Looks Different
The WTO’s own forecasts capture the tension well. Global merchandise trade growth is expected to slow from 4.6 percent in 2025 to roughly 1.9 percent in 2026, as the AI-driven surge and pre-tariff import frontloading normalise. But the WTO has also been explicit that this slowdown is a moderation, not a reversal: sustained demand for AI-enabling goods and services remains one of the only reliable upside risks in an otherwise cautious 2026 outlook, alongside ongoing uncertainty from tariff policy and geopolitical instability, including the Middle East conflict’s impact on energy markets.
The Longer Arc: AI and Trade to 2040
Beyond the immediate 2025-26 window, the WTO’s World Trade Report 2025 makes a considerably bigger claim: with the right enabling policies, AI could boost global trade by 34 to 37 percent by 2040, with global GDP rising 12 to 13 percent across different scenarios. The largest gains are projected in digitally deliverable services, up an estimated 42 percent, reflecting how AI is reshaping not just goods trade but the trade of services like consulting, software, and customer support that can now be delivered instantly across borders. WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has framed this as trade’s genuine bright spot amid what she has called the worst disruption to the global trading system in eighty years, provided economies invest in the infrastructure, skills, and policy cooperation needed to prevent AI’s gains from concentrating in only the wealthiest economies.
What This Means for Business Strategy Now
For any business tracking global trade exposure, the practical takeaway is straightforward: AI-enabling goods have shifted from a niche tech sector to a structural pillar of world trade, and that shift is not reversing in 2026, even as growth moderates. Companies with supply chains touching semiconductors, data infrastructure, or AI services are now operating inside the fastest-growing and most tariff-insulated corner of global trade. Understanding that positioning, rather than treating AI as a side story to tariffs and macroeconomics, is quickly becoming a baseline requirement for serious trade and market strategy.
