IN Brief:
- Global goods trade grew faster in the first half of 2026 than in any comparable period during the previous 15 years apart from the pandemic rebound.
- Goods used to enable AI accounted for 76% of goods trade growth during the first quarter of 2026.
- Global goods trade is forecast to expand by an average 3.4% annually through 2029, compared with 2.7% during the previous decade.
DHL and New York University’s Stern School of Business have recorded a sharp acceleration in global goods trade during 2026, with equipment used to build artificial intelligence infrastructure supplying an unusually large share of the increase. Goods trade grew faster during the first six months of the year than in any comparable period during the previous 15 years apart from the exceptional rebound after the Covid disruption.
AI investment is feeding directly into physical supply chains because computing capacity depends on manufactured hardware before any digital service can be delivered. Semiconductors, networking equipment, servers, power systems, cooling hardware and supporting electrical components are produced through specialised industrial networks, and goods used to enable AI accounted for 42% of overall goods trade growth in 2025 before rising to 76% during the first quarter of 2026.
Manufacturing those systems often requires several international movements before the finished equipment reaches a customer. A semiconductor can be fabricated in one economy, packaged and tested in another, installed on a board elsewhere and assembled into a server in a different manufacturing location, so one data centre investment can generate several freight movements before installation begins.
Transport choices then vary according to the value and urgency of each component. High value or time sensitive parts can move by air, while larger completed systems may travel by sea where project schedules allow longer transit times. A delayed chip, board or networking component can push freight towards faster modes even when the wider equipment programme was originally planned around lower cost ocean transport.
East Asia and the Pacific recorded the strongest regional trade expansion during the first five months of 2026, with trade value rising 24% from the same period a year earlier, compared with 12% growth in Europe and 11% in Africa south of the Sahara. Trade within East Asia and the Pacific represented 60% of the region’s total during the same period, up from 57% in 2025.
The concentration of semiconductor fabrication, electronic assembly and component manufacturing across Asian economies helps explain that regional pattern. Global demand for AI hardware can increase trade between neighbouring production markets before the finished system begins its final journey to Europe, North America or another consuming region, meaning part of the demand appears first as regional rather than intercontinental trade.
That production structure also makes headline bilateral trade figures a weak proxy for underlying supply dependence. Final assembly can move from one country to another while the same semiconductor, memory, substrate or power component remains embedded farther upstream, changing the visible route without removing the original production dependency.
Global goods trade is nevertheless expected to expand by an average 3.4% a year through 2029, compared with 2.7% during the previous decade. Higher tariffs and geopolitical disputes continue altering routes and supplier economics, but strong demand from sectors such as computing infrastructure is offsetting part of that drag on aggregate trade.
The US-China relationship illustrates how direct and indirect exposure can diverge. Bilateral trade between the two countries represented 3.5% of world trade at its 2015 peak but had fallen to 1.6% during the first five months of 2026, while goods entering the US from third countries continued to contain substantial quantities of Chinese materials and components.
Procurement teams therefore need visibility beyond the immediate supplier if they are trying to reduce concentration risk. A contract placed with a company in another country can still depend on a Chinese tier two or tier three producer, and changing the final assembly location will provide limited resilience against disruption at that upstream source.
Recent IN Supply coverage of DP World’s chief supply chain officer survey found companies placing greater weight on supplier diversification and alternative routing. The DHL data places those changes within a trading system that remains deeply interconnected, with close US allies reducing direct dependence on China less sharply than the US itself.
Diversification can consequently alter the shape of a supply chain without making every input independent of the same manufacturing clusters. Adding an assembly country or alternative transport route can protect against disruption in one location, while the resilience gain remains smaller when both options rely on the same component plant or raw material source farther upstream.
More complex sourcing can create additional logistics work as components pass through extra production countries, consolidation points or transport legs. Inventory visibility, supplier data and lead time control become more important when companies spread final assembly or routing across a wider network, because a disruption several tiers away can still affect multiple nominally separate supply paths.
The wider globalisation index reached a record 25.8% in 2025, combining the depth and geographic distribution of international flows in trade, capital, information and people. Physical goods are only one part of that measure, but their current acceleration has a clear industrial driver as AI infrastructure investment creates enough demand for manufactured equipment to influence global trade while the sourcing network behind it remains exposed to tariffs, concentration and transport disruption.
