China’s exports surge amid AI-driven demand

Published On 14 Oct 202614 Oct 2026.

Key points

• While shipments to the United States jumped 39.6 percent to $47.88bn, exports to the European Union rose 25.3 percent in September to $60.15bn.
• Exports grew by 36.3 percent last month year-on-year to reach $447.18bn, accelerating from a 25 percent gain in August, administration figures issued on Wednesday show.
• Imports rose 31 percent year-on-year, up from 28.2 percent in August, according to the figures from the General Administration of Customs.
• China's economy is projected to grow 4.5 percent in 2026, according to the International Monetary Fund's latest expansion outlook.
• When China's trade figures were skewed by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and stringent lockdowns, the leap marked the biggest monthly rise in exports since 2021.

China's exports surged by more than one-third in September, a boost to the world's second-largest economy as it faces slowing expansion.

Tech-related trade led the expansion, with semiconductor exports surging more than 108 percent and shipments of automatic data processing machines jumping almost 55 percent.

"High-tech demand, supported by the global and domestic AI upcycle, remained the key driver, while China's pricing and supply-chain competitiveness in other major export categories also helped sustain the momentum, " Taylor Wang, an economist at HSBC in Hong Kong, remarked in a note to clients.

While imports gained 27.5 percent to $2.43 trillion, china's total exports in the first nine months of the year rose 21.3 percent to $3.37 trillion.

For context, the gap between exports and imports in the first three quarters offered China a trade surplus of $938.1bn.

Notably, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was China's biggest export market by a wide margin, with exports rising more than 52 percent in September to $81.7bn.

After decades of relying on state-led investment and exports to power its economy, China is striving to find new avenues for expansion against the backdrop of a falling population, deflating property market, and subdued domestic consumption. It contributes far less to gross domestic product (GDP) than in advanced economies.

China's economy is projected to grow 4.5 percent in 2026, according to the International Monetary Fund's latest expansion outlook. It would be the slowest expansion since 1990, excluding the outlier years of the COVID pandemic.

"The strong export growth should keep China's growth on track to achieve its growth target of 4.5-5 percent for 2026, " Lynn Song, chief economist for Greater China at ING, informed Al Jazeera.

"Nonetheless, growth remains quite unbalanced, with domestic data quite soft in comparison, " Song remarked.

"It will be important to rebalance growth over the medium term if China is to achieve its longterm growth targets."

In short, china's exports surge amid AI is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.