The World Trade Organisation on Tuesday revised its global goods trade volume growth projection to 0.5 per cent in 2026, down from 2.4 per cent in 2025, due to rising tariff rates and heightened trade policy uncertainty. However, it said that trade in artificial AI-related products, such as semiconductors, processors, computers, servers, and telecom equipment, has been particularly strong, emerging as the key driver of global trade growth in the first half of 2025. Driven by increased global spending on AI-related products, the 2025 merchandise trade growth forecast was revised upwards to 2.4 per cent from 0.9 per cent in August. But the 2026 projection has been lowered to 0.5 per cent from the earlier 1.8 per cent, the WTO said in a statement. The top trade body also said that global services export growth is also expected to slow from 6.8 per cent in 2024 to 4.6 per cent in 2025 and 4.4 per cent in 2026. “Countries’ measured response to tariff changes in general, the growth potential of AI, as well as increased trade among the rest of the world — particularly among emerging economies — helped ease trade setbacks in 2025. Trade resilience in 2025 is thanks in no small part to the stability provided by the rules-based multilateral trading system. Yet complacency is not an option,” WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said. The World Trade Outlook report said that based on around 100 AI-related product lines, from semiconductors and processors to finished computers, servers and telecommunications equipment, trade in this group expanded by more than 20 per cent year-on-year to $1.92 trillion in the first half of 2025, compared to $1.61 trillion in the same period of 2024. By contrast, trade in non-AI goods in the first half of 2025 grew by less than 4 per cent to $10.9 trillion compared to $10.5 trillion. Although AI-related products account for less than one-tenth of world merchandise trade, they contributed nearly half of overall trade growth during this period, constituting 15 per cent of global imports and exports and 43 per cent of total trade growth, the WTO said. “These figures reflect economies' restructuring activities around artificial intelligence. The growth covers every layer of the digital value chain – from raw silicon and speciality gases to the machines that produce semiconductors, and the computers and servers powering cloud platforms and AI applications worldwide,” the report said. The WTO said that projections indicate current tariff increases have altered the global trade outlook by less than 0.1 percentage points for 2025 and 2026 combined, compared to the April forecast. “At the same time, the WTO’s assessment is that trade policy uncertainty has diminished, cushioning the trade fallout from tariff policies. The reason for this is that no economy has announced or introduced higher tariffs on imports from the United States in response to the US tariff increases, except for China,” the report said.
