Qualcomm has been working on RISC-V for a while, at outwardly-small scale. It's probably intended as a long-term alternative rather than a ready-to-go plan B. From a year ago: "The most exciting part for us at Qualcomm Technologies is the ability to start with an open instruction set. We have the internal capabilities to create our own cores — we have a best-in-class custom central processing unit (CPU) team, and with RISC-V, we can develop, customize and scale easily." -- https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/09/what-is-risc-v-and..., more: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qualcomm+risc-v&t=fpas&ia=web
Qualcomm pitched a Znew extension for RISC-V that basically removes compressed (16-bit) instructions and adds more ARM64-like stuff. It felt very much like trying to make an easier plan B for if/when they need/want to transition from ARM to RISC-V.