When making high performance chips, the main figure of merit is how small you can make individual switching elements. Smaller means faster switching but also less energy needed per switch, which in turns means less heat generation etc.
The smallest transistors can only be made by a specific company in Taiwan, and companies like nvidia and apple compete for every single wafer (unassembled chips) that comes out of that factory. This company sits at the end of a global supply chain: basically these chips can only be made if a bunch of countries all work together. One of the main policy goals of the western allies in the last decade or so has been to shut China out of this industry to prevent them from developing this capability.
If you don’t have access to the smallest transistors, you are going to have to make some pretty dire trade offs. Slower chips. Fewer cores per chip. That kind of stuff. That’s the problem Huawei is facing: no matter how good of a chip they design, it will always be at a disadvantage unless they can access the technology to make smaller transistors.
The catch here is that that factory is operating at capacity and big firms are snapping up most supply as soon as/before it hits the market. And that’s before we take into account various sanctions. So for many users, a slower chip that you can get will always beat the fast one that you can’t get.
Oh absolutely. The NV equivalent is priced at multiple millions of dollars. If you can get it.