They dropped the bag in front of TSMC and Nvidia engineers. Probably had people who got hired there, rose up high enough to get enough information and then bounced.
Most people dont think about corporate espionage and the fact that there are people who train and recruit others to act as spies for private companies.
If china is saying "yeah we don't need that nvidia shyt" it might mean rather than being 3 or 4 or 5 years behind, they may secretly have made a breakthrough.
I am not shocked at all. People really do not grasp how huge the population of china is. There's approx. What? 347 million Americans? China's population is 1.4 BILLION. You could duplicate America's population and it still wouldn't even constitute HALF of chinas population and that's without counting through millions of Chinese living in America, Canada, the UK, Australia, or other parts of Asia like Korea or Thailand.
And their government is largely made up of people with scientific backgrounds while ours is made up of lawyers, veterans, investors and business owners. If the chinese government says "we are going to spend the next 5 years developing Artificial Intelligence" they can just do it. No lobbying, no media circus, just action. They decide something is important and they pump trillions of dollars and millions of hours of manpower into getting it done. This is how america used to operate. This is like listening to someone do an impression of Jay Z. The bars and flow remind you of when you first heard Jay Z, it brings you back. Then you hear a modern Jay song and it just makes you want to go back and listen to that othe rapper again. It's crazy that a country that calls itself communist is outdoing America in capitalism.
The corporate democrats and Republicans are not the people we need right now if we are going to beat china. But I fear it might already be over. It's like finding yourself lost in a forest and the only two people who claim to know the way out cant agree with each other and neither of them actually knows how to use a map or compass and the last time they were in that forest was when they were 4 years old.