>>The U.S. government even told Nvidia and AMD to stop selling AI and machine learning accelerator chips to China, based on concerns China could resell those chips to Russia.

I've been tracking US/China relations, and restricting those chips seemed to be more a reaction to China taking 'unfair' advantage of MFN, and 'acquiring' US tech IP by any way they can. The military potential of AI is what seems to have finally caused something to happen.

As it is, the chips China can buy will work fine as guidance CPUs. Back when I was a hotshot machine level programmer, Raytheon tried to hire me. I was a little boggled that they were using 8088s in cruise missiles - but the Chinese can buy those (and better) no problem. For that matter, they can build chips at that level — just not the ones for massive parallel computation (AI).