OpenPOWER was created to sell chips more then anything else. But many people don't just want some stanard 'high performance' chip. There are many different kinds of high-performance chip. A high-performance chip, for a car, a gaming computer, a AI chip or a cloud chip that runs VM are all different.

There is simply not that amount of options in the POWER market. Its a restrictive set of vendors.

Pretty much every new startup designing high performance chips picked RISC-V. And they optimize their chips for specific use-cases.

In addition, the software ecosystem for RISC-V is arguable already better then POWER. And many companies and universities are working together on making it first class. Android is going to RISC-V, it will never be on POWER.

So if you were to design something for consumers, not going with RISC-V would be crazy.

RISC-V is also evolving far more quickly. There are like 80 working groups working on improvements all in the open. The amount of companies working on POWER is tiny in comparison.