The Chinese will flood the market with cheap AI chips just like they did with EV cars. As consumers we can’t thank them enough.
I think it will eventually result in regulation and a potential grey market, and/or implosion of the centralized LLM services — I doubt they can keep hardware from becoming cheaper forever, and diminishing returns will make consumer hardware suitable for all but the hardest problems. At that point, the hardware “moat” will be completely gone and have become an extreme unrecoverable sunk cost.
It's already moving that way with Huawei AI chips.