>they can't match Nvidia + American tech stack for the foreseeable future.

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

What about Huawei and their Ascend chips?

DeepSeek and z.ai now run their models on Ascends, and inference is basically a solved problem (especially with the architectural/ML optimizations, like 90% of them come from China right now).

From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need ~4 times more GPUs. Plus CUDA is a more mature stack than whatever Huawei provides (e.g. DeepSeek once failed to train on Ascends because they struggled with the stack). As long as China can buy Nvidia chips, it's cheaper and easier to just use smuggled chips but it doesn't mean they desperately need them.

>many of the automakers are operating on state subsidies

As opposed to many "successful" US companies living off investments without being actually profitable for years (or ever)?