Tariffs and geopolitical conflicts are disrupting global trade. In Houston, that helps break records.

Record traffic moved through Port Houston in 2025. The metro also saw an all-time high in new foreign business announcements last year as more companies look to onshore operations, Greater Houston Partnership Manager of Economic Research Colin Baker said.

“As we've seen trade tensions ratchet up, a lot of foreign companies are looking to locate their manufacturing operations here in Houston,” Baker said at GHP’s State of Houston's Global Economy event Thursday morning.

There were 117 new foreign business announcements in Houston last year, with Taiwan-based Foxconn’s $450M artificial intelligence server manufacturing investment, creating 600 jobs, being the largest.

“Taiwan has a lot of expertise in making microprocessors, making semiconductors, and they're able to share that knowledge with us here, helping Houston develop as an advanced manufacturer,” Baker said.

Other Taiwanese projects announced in 2025 include Inventec’s $251M AI hardware manufacturing investment, creating 2,000 jobs. Arizon, a radio-frequency identification hardware manufacturer, and Tension Steel Industries Co., an oil pipeline manufacturer, each invested $50M, per GHP data.

The 117 new business announcements in 2025 is up from 81 in 2024 and 72 in 2023. The upward trend is continuing into 2026 so far, Baker said.

Besides being on American soil, Houston also offers manufacturers proximity to a substantial population, a large workforce and Port Houston. Port traffic shot up from 2.2 million containers in 2016 to 3 million in 2019 and continued its upward trajectory as the pandemic disrupted trade and shifted supply chains.

The port handled a record 4.3 million containers last year, up from 4.1 million in 2024 and 3.8 million in 2023. Port Houston traffic is fairly evenly split between imports and exports, and Houston has been the nation’s top exporting metro for the past nine years, Baker said.

As retaliatory tariffs and the U.S. conflict with Iran disrupt energy flows across the global economy, Houston stands poised to fill gaps.

“We might think that there are less opportunities now than there were a few years ago,” Baker said. “But when we look at the data, we see the global economy is going to continue growing, and there is still plenty of demand for what we produce in Houston.”

Houston saw $177.3B of exports in 2025, more than Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas combined. The second-largest exporting metro was New York, with $161.4B in exports.

The top country that Houston exports to is the Netherlands, which distributes energy products to the rest of Europe, Baker said.

“That really did increase during 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, that’s when we saw countries throughout Europe implement sanctions on Russia and Russian oil, leading them to substitute to plenty of what we produce here in Texas,” he said.

Crude oil and refined petroleum products are the Houston/Galveston Customs District’s top-traded commodities.