Taiwan's Exports Hit Another Record in October as AI Hardware Demand Holds Up

Outbound shipments rose 58.9% from a year earlier to $96.76 billion, according to data reported on Monday. That beat September's record of $87.22 billion, which was itself 60.9% above a year earlier. Exports for the first ten months of 2026 reached $758.29 billion, up 47.7% on the same period last year.

The October figure is well above what Taiwan's statistics officials expected. When the September data came out last month, Beatrice Tsai, director-general of the Department of Statistics at the finance ministry, forecast that October exports would grow 40% to 44%. The Taipei Times reported at the time that she put the range at $85.2 billion to $87.7 billion.

The figures matter beyond Taiwan because the island makes most of the servers, graphics cards and advanced chips that go into AI data centres. Its export data is one of the earliest hard readings on whether hyperscalers and AI labs are still buying hardware. That question has been central to last week's sell-off in AI-linked shares, which dragged Taipei's market into its longest losing streak since 2022 before regulators stepped in.

Information, communication and audio-visual products, the category that includes servers, rose 72.9% in October. Electronic components, mainly semiconductors, rose 61.4%. Non-technology goods also grew: machinery exports rose 35.5%, base metals 35.7% and chemicals 23.7%.

The United States stayed Taiwan's largest market, taking 34% of shipments, with exports there up 55.9%. Shipments to Southeast Asia rose 83.3%, to mainland China and Hong Kong 42.9%, to Europe 46.0%, to South Korea 50.2% and to Japan 49.6%. The reports seen so far do not include import or trade balance figures for the month.

The export run is also changing forecasts for Taiwan's economy. On Monday the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research raised its 2026 GDP growth forecast to 12.34%, from 10.38% in July, and now expects exports of goods and services to grow 23.75% this year. "Earlier forecasts didn't anticipate the AI arms race or how rapidly AI technology would advance," TIER President Chang Chien-yi said, according to Focus Taiwan.

TIER expects growth to slow to 6.45% in 2027. It forecasts that the value of Taiwan's semiconductor output will rise 21.5% next year to a record NT$11.8 trillion.