I wouldn’t enter a cartel-protected market either if I had to finance that myself. If I had a captive bloc-sized market at home though…
China is big. There are a lot of customers there. And the government tends to plan long-term and is heavily subsidizing chip making tech for geopolitical reasons. Entering the western market is high-risk. Entering the Chinese market as a Chinese company and then also selling outside China after scaling up is low-risk.