IBM doesn't have to sell you the CPUs. You just need to have a handful of companies in the OpenPOWER foundation and a fab or two. Or you can buy Xilinx FPGAs,

IBM doesn't have to sell you the CPUs. You just need to have a handful of companies in the OpenPOWER foundation and a fab or two. Or you can buy Xilinx FPGAs, which are available with PPC-compatible cores built right in. Or you steal the source code, instead of the deployment binaries.