South Korea gets the IMF's biggest growth upgrade among major economies

While the IMF was busy trimming growth expectations for much of the world, South Korea was moving in the opposite direction. The fund’s July 2026 World Economic Outlook Update, released July 8, raised South Korea’s 2026 GDP growth forecast by 0.7 percentage points to 2.6%, the single largest upward revision among the 30 major economies the IMF tracks.

For context on what that 0.7-point swing means: the global growth forecast for 2026 moved in the other direction, getting clipped by 0.1 percentage points to 3.0%.

The semiconductor story driving this

The IMF was direct about what’s behind the upgrade: South Korea’s deep integration into the AI hardware supply chain.

The fund identified South Korea as one of four major net exporters of AI-related hardware globally, alongside Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia. The global race to build out AI infrastructure requires enormous quantities of chips, and South Korea is one of the places those chips come from.