So what Big Tech did in the USA is they bought up all the computer hardware needed for AI, including HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), driving prices up 400+%.
Nvidia, meanwhile, doubled the pricing on its medium-range GPU, the GeForce 5090, which now retails at near $5000.
What this did is it made local AI hardware unaffordable for the vast majority of American consumers who might have been interested in running local AI. Now, instead, they have to "rent" AI through Big Tech and pay the rising monthly access fees to access overpriced AI models offered by the same tech giants that bought up all the hardware.
Fortunately, China came along and released DeepSeek, Xaomi, Qwen, etc., with per-token costs absolutely SLASHED to a fraction of U.S. tech company tokens. (Literally costs only about 1-2% to use DeepSeek, compared to using Anthropic Opus.)
And at the same time, China is beginning to catch up on microchip fabrication and High Bandwidth Memory manufacturing, which will result in their products driving down prices for consumers sometime in 2027 (on the hardware).
So U.S. Big Tech companies tried to create a near-monopoly to enslave the American people, and China actually broke those shackles and gave American access to affordable cloud-based AI right now, with more affordable local AI inference hardware coming soon.
Go figure.