On the Fabrication front, domestic fabrication capacity by Chinese firms like SMIC is comparable to Intel in the late 2000s-mid 2010s (aka good enough for most usecases - an Nvidia Maxwell GPU or Intel Sandy Bridge CPU can hypothetically be fabricated using purely Chinese tooling).
The Chinese government did a massive subsidy dump like India is doing today in the late 2000s to try and build this kind of capacity.
Design is not there yet though (but changing rapidly), as EDAs are hard and margins low, so that entire industry got outsourced to India in the 1990s.
> world's most populated country has some capability in sophisticated industries
India does very well in High Precision High Margins sectors such as Pharmaceuticals or purely R&D focused functions like Chip Design or Software Development.
High Precision Low Margins manufacturing was always a shitshow in India due to regulations - you didn't need to deal with headaches like paying of local or state Labor Commissions for breaking labor laws in China in the 1990s or 2000s, as you can work directly with the local CCP apparatus to smooth the way
"The Ascend 910B is widely considered the most competitive non-Nvidia AI chip available in China."
Those chips are produced by SMIC. So they have a competitor not only to Nvidia, but also to TSMC. The biggest break on SMIC growth seems to have been the EUV export emergency break by Pompeo. But it may in the end turn out to be a blessing in disguise for China. The jury is still out on this one.
I wonder how long it will take even say China to reach the likes of Intel/AMD forget about NVIDIA for now ? Or have they already ?