This is an excellent point regarding a critical geopolitical matter. In some ways, it's not unlike the space race, or the race to acquire nuclear weapons. The nation that controls the most advanced chips can make the most advanced weapons and hold sway over the rest of the world.
One aspect that is less explored is the actual depth and breadth of the semiconductor supply chain. Moreover, that supply chain is bound with technical expertise at every level. You may have the fastest car at Le Mans, but you're not going to win without the best driver.
Chip design starts with design software. The most sophisticated software is made in the US. To use it, you need a variety of highly experienced designers of the right ilk (think neurosurgeon vs. cardiologist), supported by program management, organizational management, test and validation engineering and other disciplines. This synthesis of expertise and tools and equipment has to be at the highest level of capability all the way up and down the supply chain before you can get a 7nm chip to boot up.
Additionally, there are about 40 different types of process equipment used in chip fabrication. Every one of them requires dozens of product development engineers to design and build. Those teams rely on decades of both personal and organization experience to build on before they can produce tools that can, for example, apply a material like, say, tungsten, to a 12" slice of pure silicon in a layer that can be precisely measured in atoms, uniformly, across the 'wafer'.
Of all the 40 process tool types, the most complex work of science is the lithography tool made by ASML in the Netherlands. This thing produces the light needed to print the chip circuits at 7 nanometer geometries by emitting droplets of molten tin into a vacuum chamber and hitting the droplets with a 25,000 KW laser that vaporizes the tin and produces the light. It fires at 50KHz[0]. ASML has spent more than 20 years, employing 100s of engineers and scientists, in order to produce this wonder. There is no company (and certainly no government) on Earth that can catch up to ASML in any reasonable amount of time.
Next in the chip production chain is called 'Assembly' where the wafers are cut into individual chips and packaged into what you'd recognize. That node in the chain has it's own set of non-trivial equipment and expertise.
All of this is to say that there are vulnerabilities all up and down the supply chain, bouncing all over the planet. No one country has the technology to build state of the art chips from both the supply chain and expertise standpoints all within its own border. As soon as a nation has a deficit of one aspect of the overall technology required, that nation is no self sufficient.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIiqVrKDtLc