They have a pretty seamless workaround nowadays.

Build the data centers in middle eastern and other asian countries. Access it remotely.

There's no real way to restrict this without turning the internet into a draconian locked down shell of itself.

Obviously it comes down to that, but you can't make the claim that GPUs aren't a huge part of it. Otherwise, billions wouldn't be getting invested into them in the west, no? And "financial backing" essentially boils down to the researchers, which boils down to the quality of the data and research, and to compute. I do think they have really smart researchers, obviously — otherwise this wouldn't be possible.