I just realized, this sounds almost exactly like Japan's Fifth Generation AI project[1], where the Japan government funded a massive AI project where they built lots of specialized hardware (symbolic AI). Unfortunately, Intel kept chipping away to the point that it made more sense to just run Intel.
Although it sounds like that project, if successful, would've been pretty fantastic for computing in general. I'm far less interested to see proprietary models secure dominance, whichever country they're in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...