Reasoning
China’s 2023-2025 export-control gap produced DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen-2.5-72B under Apache-2.0, but US sanctions tightened in 2024-25, cutting TSMC 7 nm access for Chinese labs and raising training costs 3-4×; meanwhile US labs (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) have moved to closed weights since GPT-4 and no open-source model has yet matched GPT-4-class performance on MMLU/HumanEval, reducing precedent probability. EU and Gulf sovereign funds have signaled 2025-26 capex budgets of $10-15 B for non-US clusters, yet sustained US pressure on EDA tools and HBM supply remains the binding constraint.Key uncertainty
Whether new 2025 US export rules explicitly restrict advanced EDA software and HBM exports to Chinese frontier labs.