# One Tonne of Chips Now Buys 8,600 Tonnes of Crude Oil

> Export value is decoupling from export weight, and the densest goods on the ledger increasingly ship from East Asia, not the West.

Publisher: The Quant (https://thequant.market)  
Published: 2026-11-03  
Section: trade  
Language: en  
URL: https://thequant.market/articles/one-tonne-of-chips-now-buys-8-600-tonnes-of-crude-oil  
Cite as: The Quant, "One Tonne of Chips Now Buys 8,600 Tonnes of Crude Oil", 2026-11-03, https://thequant.market/articles/one-tonne-of-chips-now-buys-8-600-tonnes-of-crude-oil

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World exports of integrated circuits reached $974 billion in 2024 and roughly $1.27 trillion in 2025, up 19% on the same basis — goods that move by the kilogram, not the shipload. In 2005, South Korea exported chips at $726 per kilogram; by 2024 its tonne of chips was worth $5.23 million, 8,600 times the per-tonne price of the crude oil leaving American ports, against about 6,300 a decade earlier. That ratio runs from 6,500 to 8,600 depending on the data basis; the direction of travel does not. When value concentrates in goods that weigh almost nothing, a trade politics built around tonnage — tariffs, lanes, blockades — is pricing the wrong thing.

## Alan Greeenspan and the historical arc

In 2000, China exported $249 billion of goods, less than a third of America's $782 billion. By 2024 it exported $3.58 trillion — 14 times its 2000 level and roughly 70% more than the United States. Germany tripled its exports over the same span. Japan grew 47%, and its 2025 exports sit below their 2010 level.

In 1998, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Allan Greenspan remarked that "the physical weight of our GDP is growing only very gradually. The exploitation of new concepts accounts for virtually all of the inflation-adjusted growth in output." In other words, incremental value increasingly comes from intangibles, not from more of the bulky and heavy stuff. We at The Quant went to check whether this dictum stands true also in the world's trade flows.

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