Global trade grew in 2025 despite Trump tariffs, two reports show

If you only read the headlines, you might guess that global trade came to a standstill in the last year as the U.S. put into place a new tariff regime. You would be 180 degrees wrong. The big picture: Trade flows proved surprisingly robust last year, with the imposition of high U.S. tariffs changing the patterns and volumes, but not upending the basic reality of a deeply interconnected world economy.

That's the upshot of two reports out this week, one from the World Trade Organization and the other from the consulting firm McKinsey.

It reflects China rerouting its exports away from the U.S. and toward Europe and emerging markets — as well as the AI investment boom that created a surge in U.S. imports of semiconductors and related products.

By the numbers: The WTO's latest global trade outlook finds 4.6% growth in global goods trade last year, representing both AI-related products and front-loading by U.S. importers looking to avoid tariffs.

Global shipments of the hardware needed for AI rose 37% last year, the McKinsey Global Institute found, including a 66% surge in the U.S.

Zoom in: By contrast, U.S. trade in other manufactured goods was down slightly.

U.S. imports from China plunged, particularly of consumer goods facing new, high tariffs. But Chinese exports were steady, due to a surge in exports of higher-value products like electric vehicles and industrial components to the rest of the world. Chinese shipments of "intermediate inputs" like memory chips rose 9% last year, fueled by exports to Europe and emerging markets around the world.

Zoom out: The reality is that global trade amounts to a complex system in which one major disruption — last year, it was U.S. trade policy — causes ripples but doesn't so much destroy overall activity as it reroutes it. What they're saying: "When you have a highly interconnected network, you have flexibility — much more flexibility than you might think," Olivia White, a McKinsey partner and author of the report, tells Axios. Yes, but: The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz and the destruction of oil and natural gas infrastructure in the Middle East have generated a new challenge to global commerce, threatening the flow of energy as well as fertilizer needed for crops.

WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said in the report that its baseline forecast of continued growth in world trade this year "is under pressure from the conflict in the Middle East." Beyond energy, it notes that major agricultural producers including India, Thailand and Brazil rely on the fertilizer that normally passes through the Persian Gulf.

The bottom line: "Just because a trade network can be robust, self-healing and adapt to a lot of shocks doesn't mean that it can be robust to every shock," White said.