Maybe they think the more Intel conquers the markets it's in, the less competitive it will be performance/price-wise - like say how it replaced its $110 Core-based Celeron chips for Atom chips with half the performance and almost no extra "features" that also cost $110, because it knows people will keep buying "Intel" in the PC market and are not even giving AMD a second look now. It surely helped when Microsoft killed Windows RT and eliminated the ARM competition from the market for the foreseeable future.
Maybe these RISC-V chips will never get out of the labs of Google, but they could still serve to force Intel to keep prices the same on its new generations in the future, unless they want Google to really get serious about making its own chips.
“how it replaced its $110 Core-based Celeron chips for Atom chips” — they already reverted that decision. Latest Celerons 3855U, 3955U are Skylake i.e. 6th generation Core chips.
Maybe these RISC-V chips will never get out of the labs of Google, but they could still serve to force Intel to keep prices the same on its new generations in the future, unless they want Google to really get serious about making its own chips.