[DUMBGRUNT]

—”they keep key engineering pieces (like the CPUs and probably bus and memory controllers) in-house”

I had a relative that did failure analysis of ICs.
They would remove a minuscule layer(etch) then photograph and study all the many circuits...

Now you just know the Chinese lead the world in this type of reverse engineering. And there are a billion of them so they can throw some hours on the project.

[nascarnation]

I believe the “thousand talents” program has been a big success.

[pierrem15]

Seeing the design is one thing. Being able to reproduce it is another. China has been reverse engineering Russian fighter jet engines for years and their engines still fail much more frequently, and the Russian engines are much worse than ours.

At some point they will figure out how to do it, which is why cutting China out of trade with the US is imperative but seems politically impossible.