riscv has no future. the big platforms want to control everything, and the small players, well, theyre small. it peaked in 2022, and has long since run out of steam.
regarding china, etc: the current political climate will end very soon. in the US, quasi-nationalist trump will be replaced with a pax-americana democrat. xi jinping will be replaced by a pro-west faction who will want to do business with the US. this will mean scuttling all their nationalist projects in favour of buying things from the US ("we're friends with the US now, no need for this second rate domestic stuff"): homegrown riscv replaced with arm cores, homegrown gpu stuff replaced with nvidia, etc. same thing goes for russia, and i dont think i even need to mention the middle east at this point in time.
10 years from now riscv will join the ranks of openrisc, but in the meantime i suppose there's no harm in 'distributing' academic grants and investor money.
Whilst this article is Europe based, my understanding is that China is fully behind RISC-V so has strong backing to succeed.