Of course they have ways around this -- you can get black market GPUs and also API costs are SUPER cheap there -- they hack the subscription model, bundle a bunch of user accounts, and route API requests through them.
And yes they are getting to parity with US technology and will get there in a few years, they have decent chips but still not the quality of NVIDIA.
It's really a very complex situation
Without access to ASML EUV machines, the Chinese will be stuck on older less-dense chip manufacturing nodes, but in terms of building a cluster this is just a cost/efficiency issue - it means you need more chips, more electricity!