"It's happening?"

If you mean that China is attempting to close the semiconductor manufacturing gap, that's correct.

If you mean that they are closing that gap, that's baseless.

There's no evidence that they are any closer to closing that gap in manufacturing advanced microchips even with the billions of dollars they've poured into the industry since before US sanctions began.

The forum users you were talking about may not be preparing for the Chinese investment in semiconductor infrastructure, but the u.s government has been for years.

We didn't invite TSMC to set up in Arizona because we wanted a cool company in our backyard. It's directly related to the imposed sanctions and the knowledge that China will attempt to close that gap.

Biden isn't investing tens of billions of dollars into chip manufacturing on a whim, it's a deliberate preemptive response to what has obviously been coming for a while with Taiwan refusing to integrate with China and holding such technological superiority over China.