AI-enabling goods accounted for 76% of global goods trade growth in the first quarter of 2026, up from 42% across 2025, according to WTO and OECD analysis published in DHL's latest Globalization Tracker. That single demand wave, not trade policy, is what moved the needle.

The report, released October 7 by DHL and NYU's Stern School of Business, draws on more than 30 million data points. Its headline finding: global goods trade grew faster in the first half of 2026 than in any half-year period over the past 15 years — with one exception, the Covid rebound.

The cargo behind that growth is specific. Semiconductors and data-transmission equipment, the physical guts of AI infrastructure, are pulling trade lanes along. For forwarders and integrators, that means time-critical, high-value electronics flows increasingly set the pace of global volumes.

"The biggest story in global trade right now is AI - not tariffs," said John Pearson, CEO of DHL Express. "Every AI query ultimately depends on logistics. Chips, networking equipment, and the many other goods behind this technology must be in the right place at the right time."

A CEO calling his own network essential is hardly a surprise. But the numbers back him up.

What about the headwinds?

Two of them were real. The Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupted key routes, though DHL says the damage stayed concentrated in strait-dependent economies. Saudi Arabia's trade value fell 37% in the first five months of 2026 versus the same stretch of 2025. The UAE lost 7%.

Tariffs were the second headwind, and the more overrated one. U.S. tariffs did reach their highest levels in decades. Yet the U.S. accounted for only 13% of world imports in recent years, and roughly half of those imports were exempt from the increases as of August 2026. Most countries skipped broad retaliation and chased alternative markets through new trade agreements instead.

The U.S.-China decoupling, similarly, turns out to matter less than the headlines suggest. Bilateral trade peaked at 3.5% of world trade in 2015 and fell to 1.6% in the first five months of 2026. The two countries' share of international business investment is under 1%. Close U.S. allies, notably, kept trading with China largely as before.

What does this change for shippers and carriers?

For shippers, the practical lesson is portfolio logic: the fastest-growing demand sits in AI hardware supply chains, and the economies still absorbing tariff shocks are narrower than feared. For carriers and forwarders, capacity planning should follow the chips — express, time-definite networks and electronics-handling security are where the growth premium sits.

Hormuz exposure remains the exception worth stress-testing, at least for Gulf-dependent flows.

DHL's forward view: global goods trade expands 3.4% per year on average through 2029, comfortably above the 2.7% recorded over the past decade. On this evidence, the data centre build-out, not the trade war, is the schedule shippers should plan against.