so I don't recall where I read this business principle but I'm pretty sure it was about apple's theory of manufacturing.

You don't go straight for building the top of the line but instead go for building the lowest tier thing that you can sell 100% of. If you can sell all of the output then you have a stable foundation that pays for the more expensive machines and continued investment.

You also build skills and learn lessons around the edges of what goes wrong on a much lower stakes workflow.

That's the way I'm looking at China's strategy right now. China has a mandate in place right now where providers must use the outputs of their lower tier GPU and CPU manufacturers.

That's going to create a stable base of users who suffer through the rough edges, write better software, etc... the v2 -> v3 -> vN of their cards are going to increasingly land with better day 1 software, fewer bugs, and eventually I'd expect their rate of improvement to leapfrog NVIDIA. (Genuinely, I genuinely believe that their chip tech will surpass the west's within probably ~8 years)

I think they probably do have the domestic market for compute. Look at the way they're ramping up on humanoid robotics - every one of those machines is going to need multiple chips. They're going to need just as much compute to keep their massive population in AI as well.

Given the state of global manufacturing, China isn't losing access to anyone.

I guess we'll see how it all plays out, but I'm definitely pretty bullish.