Pay large salaries to the executives and lobby the government for more funding while their competition accelerates away.

What if they used their resources and expertise to push RISC-V into a position that it could compete in the mobile and datacenter markets?

You mean intel? Then they’d be moving into an even lower margin business.

If you mean ARM… then they’d be helping the competition

What would they ever gain by that?

If they can’t build decent x86 chips when they only have a single competitor switching to an inferior architecture (in the sense that it would require massive investment for it to catch up with x86) with no entry barriers for new competitors would be one of the most absurd things they could ever do.

They can do that with ARM as well, the license cost won't bother Intel. The parent argument regarding lack of margins stands.

You joke, but if past is any indicator..