Everything can be reverse engineered without any transfer or hacking. Anyone with the resources available can take a die and remove layer by layer to reverse engineer any design. All major players are dong this type of reverse engineering. Determining what everyone else is doing is just the first step. The difficulty is developing the actual fab processes required in practice and at high yield.

Our biggest mistake in the US is over valuing IP to a ridiculous extreme. The value is in the physical process and application. We value potential exploitation instead of innovation at every level. We relegate innovation to a small elite group in a lab. This is stupid. While a few brilliant people are an asset, the few can not compete with the many. By outsourcing everything and failing to value an integrated workforce there is no chance of the USA remaining relevant against a country that has an integrated workforce and is over three times larger in population.

Even more so, most leading universities in the USA have largely abandoned domestic recruiting by exorbitant costs and turned to foreign recruitment for a larger pool of the super rich. Most of these foreign students are Asian and have been for decades. These people eventually go home to places where growth is integrated and workers are valued. The USA is a terrible place to live if you are not already a billionaire. The cost of living is ridiculous, the food quality is garbage, the infrastructure is crumbling, and the quality of life is terrible for the majority of people you encounter. Getting paid a little less to move to a place that is growing and investing in its entire population is a no brainer.

Open Source always wins. The writing is on the wall for all proprietary hardware. It is already obsolete. The real value is in everything that was outsourced and those things can't be brought back. The USA is fading into obsolescence because it over values exploitation instead of innovation and the super rich over the average citizens.