I wonder if IBM has waited too long with POWER. As I recall, Fujitsu bought into SPARC along with Sun in the 1990s. They have developed and sold SPARC-based servers for several decades now, but they are reportedly getting out of SPARC in 5 or so years in favor of ARM-based hardware. SPARC is now considered to be fully open, non-proprietary and royalty free. The issue now is not monetizing SPARC but rather keeping the architecture alive and not just a piece of computing history.
Why would Hitachi want to put money into POWER at this point? Why would anyone want to, given IBM's current lack of interest? IBM is hoping to monetize POWER somehow, but it probably has a better future by following SPARC and opening it up as open, non-proprietary and royalty-free. At least POWER might stay alive with academic customers or something, and not be a totally dead architecture.