New Mexico shipped $11.4 billion in semiconductors abroad in 2025. That is 46% of its total exports, and roughly nine times the dollar value of every other category combined. If you have a mental model of New Mexico’s economy that runs through tourism or oil and gas, it is wrong. The chip fabs in Rio Rancho and Albuquerque now define what the state sells to the world.
That kind of category dominance is the through-line of the categorical export map below. We take each state’s full-year 2025 trade data from the International Trade Administration, sort by Harmonized System chapter, and color by the single largest export group. Aircraft and aerospace parts win 13 states, including Washington (Boeing), Kansas (Wichita), and Connecticut (Pratt & Whitney). Pharmaceuticals lead several states, including North Carolina, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico if you count it. Crude petroleum and refined products dominate the Gulf Coast. Vehicles and vehicle parts run a contiguous belt from Michigan through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama.
The annotation that matters is the export name inside each state. “Top export” without the product label forces readers to decode a color scale before they know what the map is saying. Dollar callouts still matter for the outliers: Wyoming’s chemical exports and Texas’s petroleum exports are not comparable in size, which is why the Texas and New Mexico notes carry the dollar and share context separately.
The 2026 tariff cycle has not yet shown up in this data. Full-year 2025 closed before the latest round took effect, and that’s the case for treating this map as an annual snapshot rather than a real-time tracker. The map worth comparing it to is the one we’ll publish twelve months from now.
Methodology
Source is the U.S. International Trade Administration’s State Exports series, full-year 2025, aggregated to the two-digit HS chapter level. Each state is colored by its single largest export chapter; the dollar annotation reports total exports for that chapter, not total state exports. Puerto Rico is shown separately with a distinct annotation since it is a customs territory rather than a state.
Caveats
- “Top export” hides volume. A state’s largest category may still be a small share of GDP. The outlier callouts are the corrective.
- HS-chapter-level aggregation can mask sub-category surprises. New Mexico’s “semiconductors” are essentially one product family, while Texas’s “petroleum” includes both crude and refined.
- Re-exports through ports of entry are attributed to the state of customs clearance, which inflates exports for Louisiana, California, and New Jersey relative to where the goods are produced.