“Increased Spending on Equipment” is not evidence of progress. In fact there are numerous examples in the past of fraud, e.g ft.com/…/1e3fe107-1b6e-43dd-8f04-e3c88502c36b (cf ““Big Fund”, which raised $51bn in its last two funding rounds.” 2 years ago, setup 10 years ago)
China is indeed pouring money on the problem and they are making significant progress. Yet it’s not competitive in terms of performance and, much harder to evaluate, it seems not to be competitive in terms of economics. To make a processor a lot of low quality ones are discarded, leading to the idea of “yield” (cf en.wikipedia.org/…/Semiconductor_device_fabricati… ). So, even if one CPU/GPU/TPU is genuinely produced, in “full autonomy” (so without e.g ASML unique machinery) and it actually on independent benchmarks comparable in terms of performance to the state of the art produced outside, it’s still impossible to evaluate how viable the production process is. Maybe there yield is very high and thus producing those chips is efficient and thus cheap, maybe the chip used in the benchmark is the single existing one and thus is prohibitively expensive.