With the high-tech arms race in full throttle, scarcely anything else matters.

That’s a lesson market participants learned again and again in recent months. It was retaught on Tuesday by Xi Jinping’s number-crunching apparatchiks who said shipments abroad expanded nearly 20% YoY last month.

If you don’t count the January-February roll-up (Beijing initially reports trade figures for the first two months of the year as a combined figure to smooth out Lunar New Year distortions — the yellow area in the chart below shows you the actual monthly breakdown), May’s export growth was the quickest in over four years.

Imports, meanwhile, grew briskly as well, rising nearly 27.5%.

Nuance is absolutely critical. Obvious as this should be, I’m compelled to point it out: These eye-popping figures are the result of a dramatic price level impact.

For example, the YoY growth rate for outgoing shipments of integrated circuits was triple-digits (110.9%, to be precise about things), but that’s a function of a double-digit rise in memory prices from April to May. The chasmic disparity in value versus volume growth is the story here.

Looking across categories, exports of automatic data processing machines jumped 66% in value terms, cell phones more than 44% and cars (EVs) nearly 40%. The value of high-tech product shipments in general rose 51% in May. By contrast, shipments of cheap “stuff” unrelated to AI or any sort of tech were actually down.

The value versus volume dynamic’s behind the import surge too. Imports from South Korea rose nearly 84%, for example. Imports of South Korean chips jumped 200% YoY last month.

Overall, China’s imports of high-tech products, prices for many of which are rising sharply, rose 47% last month from the same period a year ago. That figure for semiconductors specifically was 68%. For automatic data processing equipment, 80%.

The import surge isn’t indicative of resurrected domestic demand. Like the export jump, it’s just a manifestation of the high price associated with staying competitive in the high-tech arms race. If anything, the AI race will only exacerbate the “two-speed” nature of the Chinese economy by compelling the Party to prioritize manufacturing over consumption.

At the risk of pounding the table, the price factor means caution’s warranted when interpreting these figures. About the only thing you can say, definitively, is that they’re a testament to shortages and bottlenecks for high-tech products, where the historic imbalance between supply and demand has pushed up prices.

Both the export and import headline growth figures (which are dollar-value measures) out of Beijing beat estimates, underscoring the extent to which economists are having a difficult time staying abreast of rapidly rising costs for high-tech inputs.

(As a quick, but relevant, aside, Goldman and JPMorgan are now exploring market making opportunities for futures tied to the price of compute. Because of course they are. They’ll say it’s so companies can “hedge.” And they won’t be lying. But in the event those futures are offered, my guess is they’ll become vehicles for gambling in very, very short order.)

Everything else was a sideshow in Tuesday’s top-tier release out of Beijing. That said, it’s certainly worth noting that crude imports plunged nearly 30%. YTD, the volume of Chinese oil imports is down 5% from the comparable year-ago stretch.

In April, when China’s exports rose 14% YoY to a then monthly record of $359 billion, the SEO-optimizers at Bloomberg did a bang-up spin job. “China earns $500 million an hour from exports supercharged by AI,” they wrote.

The math’s simple: They took the dollar value of that month’s exports, divided it by the number of days in April and then divided that figure by 24. Out jumped the sort of clickbait headline that sells subscriptions — and triggers tariff threats. Et voilà.

The same simple math for Tuesday’s numbers suggests the same headline works for May’s exports, which were $376.78 billion in total, or $506,720,430.10 per hour.