WHY CHINA ISN'T ABOUT TO LEAP AHEAD OF THE WEST ON COMPUTE

Summary from the TLDR AI newsletter

Chinese hardware has closed the computational performance gap from 10x to just 3x behind NVIDIA's latest chips, yet over 90% of notable Chinese language models since 2017 were still trained on Western hardware. Major bottlenecks in chip manufacturing yields—SMIC achieves below 50% compared to TSMC's 90%—and immature software ecosystems mean Chinese developers continue preferring NVIDIA when available.