There's an important third group, companies that want access to custom instructions they need and have the resources to modify a RISC-V design but don't want to

There's an important third group, companies that want access to custom instructions they need and have the resources to modify a RISC-V design but don't want to spin a full custom design. I think both WD's and NVidia's use of RISC-V is in this category. It looks like NVidia was willing to spend for custom and WD's had been making due with larger ARM cores than they could get away with when they customized their processor - that's me reading between the lines as best I can - but WD's certainly been lost as an ARM customer and probably there'll be more in the future. Only a few companies, probably, but ones that are relatively big.