Looking at what's happening with RAM pricing and Crucial being shuttered, the doomer in me thinks they could just pull the same thing with every other PC component. It's not like some plucky band of upstarts can start 3D printing organic free-range FOSS processors, hard drives and motherboards in their garage- all of this shit comes out of a couple of giant plants in Asia. If porky strangles the supply, that's it. In the end all the average joe schmoe will be left with are cloud-based terminals that rely entirely on subscription services and that require strong identification to even use (and that will monitor and log every single fucking thing you do while drowning you in ads)
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa's old Pentium? 
Wanna ditch subscription services and sail the seas? Oops, it looks like hard drives cost 5,000 dollars and are only sold to enterprise customers. I guess you're not storing that media anywhere
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I think our hubris lies in the fact that we can't imagine being technologically behind others and severely underestimate how quickly other nations, such as China, can advance. It's entirely possible US tech sector cannibalizes itself, but that doesn't mean that will be the case everywhere. I can't say it would be pretty tho' we should try to minimize the collateral damage.
Unless of course the likes of Orwell get their wishes, the defeat of communism is finalized, remaining anarchist splinters continue to be hunted down for eternity and Liberal forces end up dominating the world.
I wasn't ignoring China, it just wasn't relevant to the point I was trying to make, which is about western companies who sell to western consumers. When there's a hardware market gap due to the AI bubble popping (and assuming Chinese tech isn't too embroiled or affected by it, look at AI investment stats in China, and they're not as crazy as in the west, but there's still a big chunk of cash in AI), China and other countries will have an opportunity to fill it themselves, that's true, and they will certainly try to go in.
However, infrastructure takes time to build, workers take time to train, and sales channels are hard to construct from scratch. Doesn't matter if you have the immortal science of Xi Jinping thought on your side, it will take time and investment, which might not be easy to find in the aftermath of a stock bloodbath as the one we're anticipating.
All in all, the western consumer market, largely impoverished by the aftershocks of the AI bubble bursting and accelerated de-dollarization, will be the last priority for hardware makers everywhere. And I don't see this changing short of world revolution happening overnight.
i think a lot more of that investment is into "AI" tech other than LLMs tho
Yes, I'm just saying we should try to reduce the damage that will come from when the empire goes fully into military-surveillance enterprise, that's probably what will happen with all the jobless people and where they will go or be controlled by.
Washington could even win in the end, there are forces in every nation that are their allies. Including China. I'm probably never affording a computer again either way, so I'll try to contribute to building a world where someone like me in the future can be making fun computer games to play with their friends. I can see that happening too.
America doesn't have an education system and they don't like making stuff themselves, you need time to learn how to do that also, they outsource that to the rest of the world, in order to make their own citizens feel wealthy and happy. I don't want to take that away. I just wish everyone could have that.