Taiwan is growing at 13%. Finland and the Netherlands know how this can end

Taiwan sold $87bn of goods abroad in September 2026. Two and a half years ago a normal month was about $40bn. Exports are running 61% above a year earlier, and in the first nine months of 2026 Taiwan has already exported more than in the whole of 2025.

The question is not whether the boom is real. It is what a boom this narrow does to the rest of an economy.

The economy grew 12.9% in the year to the second quarter. That is the kind of number poor countries post when they first industrialise. Taiwan is a rich economy of 23 million people.

The cause is no mystery. The world is building data centres for artificial intelligence, and it needs one island to do it.

Follow the buyers

The customs records of Taiwan's customers show where the surge is going. The United States bought $116bn from Taiwan in 2024 and $202bn in 2025. China is still the largest buyer, at $231bn, but its purchases grew 6%.

The same records show what is being bought. Chips were 43% of everything the world imported from Taiwan in 2025. Computers and their parts, which is where AI servers are counted, were another 27%. Seven-tenths of the island's exports are one supply chain.

An economy at two speeds

Booms like this do not spread evenly. In 2017 a Taiwanese factory worker and the average employee earned the same: about NT$50,500 a month. By 2025 manufacturing paid NT$69,400 and the average was NT$63,400.

Unemployment is 3.3% and has barely moved. Inflation is 2.7%. Whoever is outside the chip economy lives with prices set by those inside it, without the pay rise.

The Netherlands, 1959

Economists have a name for this. In 1959 the Netherlands found one of the world's largest gas fields at Groningen. Gas exports poured in, the guilder rose, and Dutch factories that had nothing to do with gas found they could no longer compete. Manufacturing jobs fell for a decade. In 1977 The Economist called it the Dutch disease.

Taiwan's central bank has so far kept the currency near 32 to the dollar, adding to reserves of $601bn. That protects other exporters. It also explains a current account surplus of 17% of GDP, which trading partners will not ignore for ever.

Finland, 2000

The closer parallel is a company, not a commodity. In 2000 Nokia produced about 4% of Finland's GDP and a fifth of its exports, by the estimates of Finnish researchers. It accounted for a large share of the country's growth for a decade.

Then the product changed. Nokia's handset business collapsed after 2008, and Finland's economy was smaller in 2015 than it had been seven years before. Nothing was wrong with Finland. It had become very good at one thing at the moment the world stopped needing it.

Japan offers the same warning from Taiwan's own industry. Japanese firms made about half of the world's chips in the late 1980s. Their share today is under a tenth.

Our view

We expect Taiwan's export growth to fall below 20% by March 2027, without exports falling at all. This is arithmetic more than forecasting. March 2026 exports were already $80bn. For growth to stay above 20%, March 2027 would need to top $96bn. We put the odds of a slowdown below 20% at roughly two in three.

The headlines will read as a bust. They will be wrong. The level of exports is what pays wages, and we see no sign of that falling while data-centre orders are still rising: export orders were $103bn in August.

The risk to our view is that the build-out is still accelerating, in which case 20% is too cautious. The risk to Taiwan is the one Finland met: a single product, a single moment.

What to watch

Being essential to the world is a strength for exactly as long as the world wants what you make.

• Monthly export orders. They lead shipments by one to three months.
• The gap between factory pay and average pay. Our measure of how far the boom is spreading.
• The exchange rate. A move well below 30 to the dollar would squeeze every exporter that does not make chips.
• US trade policy. A $200bn import bill from one island is the kind of number that attracts tariffs.