> what are we (in the US) even building these super massive data centers for?

Partially to make investors think it's worth giving US companies a lot of money. Also, I think distillation is a significant part of why Chinese models perform as well as they do. I think that's completely fair play (OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Meta stole a lot of their training data). But I would expect if US model developers stopped right now Chinese development would slow down.

US companies are clearing the path, others follow in their wake.