You can't fab the same POWER9 that ships from IBM, but like you implied, someone could (eventually) fab a POWER9 CPU built on an open-source core.
The microwatt project [0] was demoed at the OpenPOWER Summit and is an open-source softcore. I'm very interested in watching to see what happens with this project and how much of the ISA they end up implementing. They've run a subset of micropython [1] on it and apparently gotten a few FPGAs working. The Summit talk [2] mentioned DRAM support and Linux support potentially being on the roadmap.
[0]: https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt