I'm curious why you think RISC-V is the future and not ARM. I guess part of it depends on how far into the future we're looking, but it doesn't seem like ARM license fees are so high that they're prohibitive.
ARM generates less than $2B in revenue. Apple posts $275B in revenue. Are ARM's fees just a rounding error to anyone with scale? And ARM knows that it needs to remain competitive on its licensing fees to make sure that people don't move to RISC-V.
I'd guess that a lot of ARM's revenue actually comes from the processor design, not the ISA. ARM will license you cores. RISC-V won't license you cores since they're not designing them.
It's possible that RISC-V will see great things, but I'm kinda thinking that ARM's license fees probably aren't much. Apple especially wouldn't be paying much since they're not licensing cores. Anyone that is licensing cores would need to replace that R&D with their own - which might be more expensive than it's worth. Qualcomm seems to still lean on ARM's designs.
And I think there's certainly a big head start in optimizing things for ARM that will be tough to overcome.
I just think it seems unlikely that current customers will drop ARM to save 0.1% of their revenue - especially if they need to start taking on the costs of designing the chips themselves, contributing to compilers, etc.
The exception I can see is China. China might want a free-and-clear route to their own processors without worrying about other nations denying them access to IP.
