When President Donald Trump returned to office last year, he framed his tariff policy as a bid to bring manufacturing of strategic materials and equipment back to the U.S.
More than a year later, his sweeping trade agenda has indeed forced a crackdown on imports, so much so that a single technological force has grown into the primary engine of the country’s trade economy.
Infrastructure and research costs accounted for more than $140 billion of that sum, with a large chunk earmarked to build the massive data centers that have been powering the AI boom. That splurge has required enormous amounts of raw construction materials, not all of which can be cheaply sourced in the U.S. The AI boom, in fact, is one of the only factors keeping U.S. import growth in positive territory.
“Trade in AI-related products is a very important force behind U.S. trade over the past year,” Michael Waugh, the author and an economist at the Federal Reserve, wrote in the study.
“In fact, it might be even more important than dramatic changes in U.S. trade policy.”
Waugh’s findings point to the AI build-out becoming so dominant it’s offsetting weakness almost everywhere else in the import market. With AI-related products stripped out, non-AI imports in January 2026 were actually 14% below their typical 2023 level.
The largest trading partners for AI products last year were Taiwan and Mexico, which together account for around half of the AI-related trade. Taiwan remains a crucial hardware supplier, particularly when it comes to semiconductor chips, the building blocks underlying the massive computing power required to train and run AI models. Mexico sells computing equipment to the U.S. too, but it’s also a critical provider of electrical wiring and HVAC systems needed to build data centers.
The global nature of the AI supply chain isn’t lost on the administration, the study suggests. Waugh found effective tariff rates on AI-related products were only 4.5% at the end of 2025, versus 12.1% for non-AI goods, largely because product-level exemptions carved out much of the AI supply chain from the broader tariff wall. Around 69% of AI-related imports fell on at least one exemption list, according to the study.
The Trump administration is likely well aware of these challenges. Even when the president had a chance to reorganize his trade policy earlier this year (when the administration moved to reinstate some tariffs after the bulk of them were struck down by the Supreme Court), the sweeping exemptions for AI-related products largely remained in place, Waugh found in his study.
