By Justin Lahart
The White House placed substantial tariffs on foreign products in 2025, and still the goods trade deficit widened. Maybe that's another thing to blame on artificial intelligence.
A quick glance at the data shows that the effect of America's AI buildout on trade has been big. The U.S. imported about $173 billion of semiconductors and related products last year, for example, compared with $138 billion in 2024 and $118 billion in 2023. Even so, the actual impact might be even more substantial than simply tallying up the jump in imports of obvious items such as semiconductors, according to a new working paper posted to the National Bureau of Economic Research's website on Monday from Minneapolis Federal Reserve economist Michael Waugh.
Waugh used a large language model to classify more than 18,000 product codes in the trade data by their relevance to data-center construction and operations. So not just chips and computer servers, but also items such as cooling equipment. On that basis, he estimates that AI-related products accounted for nearly a quarter of U.S. imports in 2025. From 2023 to 2025, he calculates that AI imports grew 73%, while over the same period imports of non AI-related products increased just 3%. What's more, a lot of AI-related products received favorable tariff treatment. Waugh estimates that the average tariff on AI goods came to about 4.5% at the end of the year, versus about 12% for non-AI products.
Absent the AI boom, Waugh estimates America's 2025 goods trade deficit of about $1.24 trillion would have been trimmed by nearly $200 billion.
This item is part of a Wall Street Journal live coverage event. The full stream can be found by searching P/WSJL (WSJ Live Coverage).
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 13, 2026 13:21 ET (17:21 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments