Third Upgrade, Best Year Since 2021: AI Exports Lift Hong Kong’s Growth Forecast to 4.8%

Hong Kong’s economy has spent much of this year surprising its own forecasters. On Friday, the government lifted its 2026 growth projection for the third time, to 4.8 per cent.

The path is worth tracing. In February, officials expected the economy to grow by 2.5 to 3.5 per cent. In August, they nudged the range up to 3.5 to 4.5 per cent. Now they have settled on a single, higher figure. If it holds, this will be the city’s strongest year since 2021, when output rebounded by 6.5 per cent after the pandemic slump.

The driver is not tourism or property, the two engines Hong Kong usually talks about. It is trade linked to artificial intelligence. Demand for servers, chips and related components has been surging worldwide, and Hong Kong’s port, airport and trading houses sit in the middle of many of those supply chains, moving goods between mainland factories and buyers abroad.

That strength comes with a caveat the government itself acknowledged: the outside world remains uncertain. A business cycle built on one booming product category can turn quickly if investors start to question how much AI hardware the world really needs, a worry that has rattled regional chip stocks in recent days.

For now, though, the numbers give the administration a rare piece of good news to take into the final weeks of the year.