2. China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already

Have you looked at Huawei Ascend chips? They are on a 7nm process, so at first blush you could say they're not competitive. I think they run at at between 15045% the performance of Nvidia's fancy chips (Grace Blackwell etc) and also consume a lot more power, presumably requiring more power again to dissipate the resulting heat.

On the plus side, though, they're designed from the group up to sit in massive arrays have 4tb of memory interconnect bandwidth. My understandin g is that model providers like Deepseek are doing their training on nvidia gPUs but all the inference is moving toward Huawei.

At some point they'll be caught up, either via lithography breakthroughs, or by building on their architectual strengths.