That's probably the main bear argument concerning RISC-V--at least as it applies to the West. ARM has a big ecosystem, it licenses at reasonable rates, so if you want to design a chip, cost-savings associated with RISC-V are in the noise. (And it's at least a bit unclear what other benefits associated with open source software come into play.)

riscv proponents said that ARM licence rate might be reasonable, but negociation time is (or was at the time riscv was just a concept) not reasonable at all.

And time to market is quite important in this area.

Also:

- ARM might license you cores for years and suddenly stop

- you might want to switch to a different vendor but all your code, tooling and knowledge is locked-in

- there is no guarantee that ARM will negotiate with you. Especially true for small companies, community projects, embargoed countries.

- ARM will not allow to relicense their "IP" to 3rd parties, either paid of for free

At some point if it catches on, being open and royalty free, I should be able to call Global Foundries, TSMC, or Samsung and say "I want 300,000 of your RISC-V chips in 64 bit with X list of extensions built on your Y nm process".