The Tariff War's Biggest Winners and Losers — McKinsey's Verdict Is Not What Anyone Expected

McKinsey found the tariff war created clear winners and losers — but not the ones Trump predicted. Here is who actually gained and who actually lost.

When McKinsey Global Institute published its comprehensive assessment of the first year of Trump's tariff regime — timed to coincide with Liberation Day's first anniversary — the analytical conclusions challenged the assumptions of virtually every party in the trade debate. Neither the 'tariffs will destroy global trade' camp nor the 'tariffs will bring manufacturing back to America' camp found vindication.

The clear winners: Vietnam, Mexico, and Taiwan, whose export sectors absorbed the supply chain redirections that tariffs created. Vietnam saw bilateral trade deficits with the US reach record levels as Chinese production shifted to Vietnamese facilities for final assembly. Mexico's manufacturing sector similarly captured flows from US companies restructuring their supply chains to retain USMCA-compliant status while reducing direct China exposure. Taiwan expanded its role as the preferred destination for American semiconductor and electronics sourcing that the US-China bifurcation required.

The second winner: AI infrastructure. American cloud companies and AI hardware manufacturers captured a disproportionate share of global data-centre investment as countries that wanted to build AI capacity chose American-supplied infrastructure over Chinese alternatives — partly for geopolitical reasons and partly because American AI capability genuinely led. The US provided approximately half of the world's new data-centre capacity in 2025.

The clear losers: American consumer goods importers, whose cost structures absorbed tariff costs that they could pass only partially to consumers without losing market share. Traditional manufacturing workers whose plants were supposed to be reshored but weren't — because the economics of reshoring require more than tariff protection when automation, logistics infrastructure, and trained workforce constraints apply.

The counterintuitive finding: both US imports AND Chinese exports reached all-time highs in 2025. Trade adapted rather than contracted. The tariff war reshaped who traded with whom and through which intermediaries — it did not stop trade from happening.