And there is the really big flaw in a regulatory scheme. Can you really think of a way to arrange international coordination against making better and faster chips? How well has international coordination on, say, carbon emissions worked? If some countries outlaw making better chips, the others are likely to see that as a place where they can get a competitive advantage. If some countries outlaw importing better chips, that too will be seen by others as a place to get advantage, by using the chips themselves. And smuggling in high-capability chips from places where they are legal will be tempting for anyone who needs computing power.

The presence of the facilities in US allies is not itself particularly useful to overcoming the problem of coordination. The power of the US over, say, Taiwan is limited to the point where seeking shelter under the protection of the nuclear arsenal of the People's Republic of China would seem a better option. There doesn't seem to me to be any plausible scenario where current governments would weigh existential risk from Moore's Law higher than existential risk of nuclear war from bombing a country that has a nuclear umbrella.