China is already making it's own chips. The one most commonly discussed is the Huawei Ascend 950 (which exists and is in production). NVIDIA say the 950 is about equivalent to an NVIDIA H100, and DeepSeek in this leaked meeting are saying that about 4 950 cards are equivalent to 1 NVIDIA "B" one (Blackwell B200 I think).

Apparently production is constrained though, with DeepSeek saying they were only able to get an allocation of 16,000 950 cards. They have plenty of money, but are limited by the number of cards available to buy, and therefore the size of models they can train. They mentioned having a 20,000 GPU cluster. Other companies like Kimi, with a ~3T param model, clearly have a lot more compute, probably all NVIDIA.

DeepSeek have their own "TileLang" software, which sounds a bit like the Triton kernel compiler, and isolates them from the diffences between NVIDIA and Huawei chips - they are deliberately avoiding any CUDA dependency.