The article is so bad. Why do they refuse to say anything about what these companies are actually trying to make. RISC-V Chips exist, does the journalist just not know? Does the company refuse to say what they are doing?
The fact that California housing pushed Intel to Oregon probably helped lead to its failures. Every time a company relocates to get cost of living (and thus payroll) costs down by relocating to a place with fewer potential employees and fewer competing employers, modernity slams on the breaks.
This wiki page has a list of Intel fab starts, you can see them being constructed in Oregon until 2013, and after that all new construction moved elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...
I can imagine this slow disinvestment in Oregon would only encourage some architects to quit an found a RISC-V startup.
Arizona is also a mistake --- a far worse place for high tech than Oregon!. It is a desert real estate ponzi scheme with no top-tier schools, no history of top-tier high-skill intellectual job markets. In general the sun belt (including LA) is the land of stupid.
The electoral college is always winning out over the best economic geography, and it sucks.