Because it forced them to focus on efficiency, instead of throwing more compute at the problem.

Just like in software, some of the most beautiful solutions come from constraints. Think, the optimisations that game developers implemented because of the frame budget.

On top of that, China is also facing hardware constraints, which is pushing companies to develop better domestic chips for AI training. It'll be interesting to see how things perform once Huawei's newer hardware is fully deployed at DeepSeek.