FACT: 831 data centers are under construction in the United States.

THE NUMBERS: Taiwanese GDP growth* –

Actual, Q1 2026	14.60%
Taiwan government full-year forecast (May 2026)	9.60%
21st-century average rate	3.10%

* Taiwan Directorate-General for Budget, Accounting, and Statistics for 2026 figures; IMF World Economic Outlook database for 21st-century average.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

The Chinese calendar’s twelve animals and five elements, rotating on their 60-year cycle, converge to make 2026 a “Fire Horse” year. Horses are said to embody energy and independence; fire, passion and inspiration. Writing in Taipei-based CommonWealth Magazine, Judy Lin says such a year:

“Brings a surge of intensity, momentum, and transformative change. This once-in-60-
years combination amplifies courage and restlessness, rewarding bold action while
testing focus and restraint.” 

Taiwan’s stat people provide data support for Ms. Lin’s high-energy forecast: their laconic GDP release last Friday reports that — precisely as she was writing up the zodiac outlook — the Taiwanese economy was growing at a rate of 14.6%, and predicted 9.6% over the full year. Setting aside an anomalous 10.5% rebound after the financial crisis in 2010, that would be Taiwan’s biggest growth surge in 40 years and triple the island’s 21st-century average.

What has happened? The background is the worldwide, and particularly American, surge of investment into AI data centers. Some samples:

* McKinsey estimates $7 trillion going into data centers over the next five years, with 40% of it spent in the United States. The global total would account for about 1% of the world’s likely $690 trillion in GDP over these years, and the ~$2.8 trillion U.S. investment would be about 1.6% of U.S. GDP.

* UNCTAD says data center-building accounted for a fifth of the $1.6 trillion in “greenfield” FDI investment last year.

* DataCenterMap, which counts the number of actually operating data centers, reports 11,534 live worldwide, including 4,312 in the United States, and Bloomberg NEF says Americans are building 831 new ones.

In sum, lots of construction projects, huge amounts of money spent to build them, and as data centers prepare to go live, they quickly fill up with AI chips, server racks, motherboards, graphics processing units, cooling systems, CPUs, and the like. The world’s largest centers for production of these things are the three Science Park complexes Taiwan launched in the 1970s – Hsinchu, Southern Taiwan, Central Taiwan — which now serve as home bases for semiconductor and IT hardware manufacturers of the TSMC, UMC, MediaTek, Foxconn, etc. type.  For the past two years, they have been sending a torrent of this stuff from Taiwan – a recent Air Cargo News report suggests likely 1,500 tons of semiconductors and AI server racks arriving by plane daily, along with ships loaded with power distribution units, heavy cooling systems, and fiber-optics – to the new data centers Bloomberg describes.

U.S. trade data are a window on the scale of this flow. They show total imports from Taiwan more than tripling from $88 billion in 2023 to a likely total above $300 billion this year, and Taiwan overtaking Korea, Germany, Japan, and now China to trail only Canada and Mexico as a U.S. import source. Two quick tables:

1. U.S. goods imports 2023-2026

	2023	2024	2025	Jan.-March 2026
Mexico	$473 billion	$506 billion	$535 billion	$138 billion
Canada	$418	$412	$383	$92
Taiwan	$88	$116	$201	$67
China	$427	$439	$308	$61
Vietnam	$113	$137	$194	$56
Japan	$147	$148	$146	$34
Germany	$159	$160	$156	$34
Korea	$116	$132	$125	$36
India	$84	$87	$103	$23
UK	$64	$68	$65	$16

Census, Goods Trade by Country

2. Imports from Taiwan by product type, 2023-2026

	2023	2024	2025	Jan.-March 2026
Total	$88 billion	$116 billion	$201 billion	$67 billion
Computer components	$14	$26	$85	$37
Semiconductors	$22	$37	$58	$13
Optical/magnetic media	$2	$3	$4	$2
All else	$50	$50	$52	$15

USITC Dataweb, NAICS classifications

This explains the Fire Horse-style “intensity” and “momentum” in Taiwan’s economic data. On the U.S. side, IT goods have been so far mostly exempted from the tariff binge that has weighed down auto production, retail, chemical industries, and construction. So even as U.S. macro-econ data take on an alarmingly ‘stagflationary’ look – high inflation, low hiring, falling GDP growth, and collapsing consumer confidence – the data-center construction boom continues to offset at least some of the drag.

Big events, of course, raise complex questions: “transformative change” in social life and employment, the local impacts of these hundreds of construction projects on traffic, utility prices, and land use. If calendar animals and elements are of use, 2027 is a “Fire Goat” year, thought still to involve some intensity and momentum, but temper them with more reflection and creativity. For a look at what these might entail, close the horoscope tab and see PPI President Will Marshall’s thoughtful guide to policy on data centers and AI.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

Fire Horse:

Zodiac animals and elements explained, from the U.S.-based Asia Society.

… and Taiwan’s CommonWealth Magazine explains the “Fire Horse” year.

The AI future:

PPI President Will Marshall on the road forward for AI and data center construction.

For a long read, Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas reflects on technology and society, human and artificial intelligence, common good, exclusion and communion, through a “Babel v. Jerusalem” lens.

Data on data centers:

McKinsey estimates the scale of worldwide data center investment and offers ideas for U.S. states.

UNCTAD on data centers as the top driver of foreign direct investment worldwide last year.

DataCenterMap.com counts data centers by country.

And Bloomberg NEF monitors data center building in the U.S.

Taiwan’s boom:

“TECRO” — the Taipei Economic & Cultural Relations Office — is Taiwan’s de facto Embassy
in DC.

The Directorate-General for Budget, Accounting, and Statistics has the most recent GDP growth
report.

And some growth context, using the IMF’s April 2026 “World Economic Outlook” 2025 growth estimates, supplemented for the U.S.by last Thursday’s downbeat BEA report on first-quarter growth:

Taiwan (Taiwanese government)	9.60%
China	4.40%
ASEAN-5	4.10%
WORLD	2.60%
United States	2.30%
Korea	1.90%
U.S. (actual Q1 2026)	1.60%
European Union	1.30%
Japan	0.70%

And the sci/tech background:

Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council

A Japanese/Taiwanese academic looks at Taiwan’s science parks as a successful industrial strategy model.

… and the Hsinchu Science Park.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

FACT: U.S. layoffs are up for four consecutive years.

THE NUMBERS: Annual U.S. layoffs*

2025	21.2 million
2024	20.0 million
2023	19.9 million
2022	17.6 million
2021	17.1 million
2020 (pandemic year)	40.8 million
2015-2019 average	21.7 million

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

An idea for the next Congress, floated four years ago by then-PPI Workforce Policy Development Director Taylor Maag and Ed Gresser, and still good now: revive the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, but open it to everyone.

As an entry point, the Raleigh News & Observer has a stark lede last week:

“American tiremaker Goodyear Tire & Rubber plans to shut its long-running Fayetteville plant and eliminate approximately 1,700 jobs in what would be one of the biggest factory closures by employment loss in recent North Carolina history. Goodyear announced this week it is talking with the local workers’ union to end site operations by December 2027.” 

Not only North Carolina’s largest recent factory closure, this event appears to be the largest U.S. mass factory layoff outside the processed-food business in the 15 years since the end of the financial crisis. To put the impact in context, Metro Fayetteville is home to about 390,000 people, with the Goodyear plant joining a Wal-Mart distribution center and the local hospital as the top private-sector employer. Goodyear’s press comment cites short-term cost issues and lower consumer demand for tires; its quarterly earnings calls cite a loss of $420 million this year to “inflation, tariffs, and other costs” as a complementary challenge. (See Eric Boehm in Reason for a close look at the event, and analysis of the impact of tariffs and the Iran war’s interruption of petrochemical stocks for synthetic rubber.)

This particular closure comes in a larger environment in which layoffs are not at extreme highs, but have risen for five years in a row. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey, last year’s 21.2 million layoffs were the largest annual total since the Covid pandemic in 2020, and about equal to the rates of the 2010s. To put this aggregate figure in human perspective, each day about 161 million Americans go to work, and about 60,000 come home with pink slips.

Their standard support program, unemployment insurance, provides a post-layoff stipend of up to 26 weeks in some states as they look for the next job. From 1962 through the summer of 2022, though, the smaller “Trade Adjustment Assistance” program offered a much broader range of options to those dislocated workers who could show that import competition or job shifts overseas “contributed importantly to [their] separation or threat of separation.” Background on this:

Origins and benefits: President John F. Kennedy launched “TAA” in 1962, as a complement to his very ambitious trade-liberalizing and tariff-cutting bill. By 2015, when TAA got the last of its 18 renewals and upgrades, it had evolved into a sort of pilot program in active labor-market policy, offering a menu of self-help options appropriate to workers with widely differing career goals and local options: two years of job training for those seeking a new career path; temporary wage insurance for older workers taking lower-paying jobs; health care tax credits; and relocation support for workers planning to move to areas with more employment opportunities. Examining the results in 2018, New York Fed researcher Ben Hyman found strong benefits for workers and a useful concentration of benefits in regions with particularly high needs:

“Ten years out, TAA-trained workers have $50,000 higher cumulative earnings, driven by both higher incomes and greater labor force participation. Yet annual returns fully depreciate after ten years. … Returns are further concentrated in the most disrupted regions.”

Small scale and structural limits: TAA didn’t, though, actually serve many workers. From 2014 to 2018, according to the DoL’s annual reports, about 85,700 displaced workers a year got TAA benefits. This would be about 0.5% of the era’s 21.6 million annual layoffs. Modest use isn’t per se a problem — lots of workers find jobs after layoffs and don’t require extra support — but the limitation imposed by TAA’s tie to trade competition made it hard to get. Since eligibility depended on proving imports or job shifts overseas “contributed importantly” to the layoff, most workers — health sector, retail, gas stations, beauty parlors, government agencies — weren’t eligible at all. And though “contributed importantly” isn’t in principle a very high bar, in practice, it created a big obstacle by requiring workers in distress to find the statistics and economic analysis necessary to demonstrate eligibility.

And a core question: The TAA concept also, as Gresser and Maag noted in 2022, had a “troubling inequity” at its core:

Workers who lose jobs to trade competition can get more generous benefits than workers who lose jobs to recession or domestic competition.  Is there really a strong ethical case to distinguish between (say) a displaced clothing factory worker and a displaced waitress or gas station attendant, and view the former as more in need of benefits or more entitled to benefits than the latter? 

With the program then on the verge of lapsing, they urged Congress to renew it, but drop the trade requirement and offer TAA-type benefits to all workers displaced through no fault of their own. Subsequent events — events such as the Goodyear factory closure, where U.S. tariff increases rather than import competition are likely the “important contributor,” or the broader acceleration of technological change and outmoding of particular skills or industries — only add force to the conclusion. Congress regrettably didn’t act then, and TAA has lapsed for four years. The new Congress arriving next January, or the early-stage presidential campaigns launching around that time, can take it up now.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s New Skills for a New Economy project, with Michael Pearson as Director, has an analysis of a robust workforce development system that is fully-funded, modern, industry-responsive, and equips current and future workers with the skills they need to get ahead.

Gresser and Maag (2022) on re-authorizing Trade Adjustment Assistance, but opening it to everyone. Their estimate was that such a program would serve about a million displaced workers annually, at a cost of about $6 billion per year.

… and follow Maag’s work at Jobs for the Future.

Layoffs:

The Raleigh News & Observer reports on Goodyear’s Fayetteville factory closing announcement.

Eric Boehm in Reason takes a close look at the events, and the impact of tariffs and war.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey (most recent release here; and database here) puts individual events in the context of national job openings, new hires, layoffs, quits, and retirements.

TAA data and status:

The Labor Department’s TAA database, with counts of petitions and worker certifications from 2010 forward.

… and DoL’s formal Annual Reports on TAA from 2009 to the lapse in 2022.

An evaluation from Ben Hyman of the New York Fed, 2018.

And a Ways and Means Committee renewal hearing featuring workers, firm owners, and state officials, 2021.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.