But it actually had the exact opposite effect.

First the US blocked China from buying NVIDIA's H100, but allowed NVIDIA to sell them a China-special nerfed H100, the H800

Then the US blocked the H800

Then the US realized that China was indeed accelerating their US independence, so does a U-turn and has now approved the H200 (more powerful than both the H100 and H800) for sale to China, on a case-by-case basis

However - and here is the real kicker - China themselves are now blocking H200 purchases since they want the acceleration towards Chinese homegrown solutions to continue, and now we have Chinese models being served on Huawei Ascend chips, with next generation Ascend 750 chips (using CXMT made memory) targetting training currently in testing.

Now we have Apple asking the US government for permission to buy memory from CXMT given the global shortage!

You misunderstood my comment. My hypothesis is that it did _neither:_ it accelerated along an axis, and American SOTA/frontier is now laggard (efficiency).

Deepseek and Kimi are writing paper after paper with substantial architecture improvements for efficiency, because they can't just throw more hardware at the problem.

And China is now doing something on the hardware axis; which it may have never explored were it not for the sanctions.

Slow? The chip ban was just a few years ago. The result? China is more or less self-sufficient in chips, about to catch up with the latest generation. They even banned China from using lithography machines. The result? China is now producing lithography machines that only few in the world could produce.

Let's face it - all bans were dumb. They just gave China the legal (per WTO rules) justification to start producing everything domestically. The bans work as a reverse tariff, as a protectionist measure that actually protects your competitor. If China did those, others could bring China to court at the WTO. But the US did that, so nobody can sue China.