> What about Huawei and their Ascend chips? From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need more of them. Slower = lagging behind the US further over time. 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.

It's a catch-22 of sorts.

Either China can catch up (what exactly that will mean I'm unsure but I believe they will be able to), in which case we don't need to sell them the chips to let them do it faster, or they can't catch up in which case we shouldn't sell them chips allowing them to do so.

I'm just not seeing a compelling argument to sell them state of the art chips here.

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

No it's not comparable