It's not a chip, it's a CPU core. You still need to add a lot of things to make a chip: interface for DRAM, something like PCIe for input and output. And you have to do layout, timing calculations, and all that kind of thing.
But yes, if you have sufficient funding and expertise you can take their CPU core -- approximately as good as the performance cores in the Samsung Galaxy S8 or the Raspberry Pi 4 -- and without permission or payment or even notification use them in your own chips.
The Verilog code for the 4 RISC-V cores of various sizes is licensed with the Apache License.
They are some of the best existing RISC-V cores. One of them was the fastest existing RISC-V core when it was introduced.
You can use the Verilog code to either synthesize it for a FPGA and run it in a FPGA board with a large enough FPGA, or if you have access to an ASIC manufacturing process, you can synthesize it for that process and include the RISC-V cores together with whatever else is needed in a custom IC, without paying any royalties.
Using one of these cores for a FPGA board seems very attractive, because most other open-source cores that are available have a much lower performance.
They have also provided versions of the gcc compiler, of the glibc standard C library, of the boot loader, of the Android Bionic standard library and a few other software packages that are needed to run programs for Linux or Android on these RISC-V cores, which have many extensions over the base RISC-V specification.
Alibaba appears to have played for a few years with RISC-V, but even if they have succeeded to design the fastest such cores, eventually they have decided to use ARMv9-A for their real high-performance server CPUs.
I don't think so. You still need at least "millions of dollars" and some experienced dev staff (most likely snatched from the big guys) if you plan on making anything competitive with intel, arm, or apple.
But yes, if you have sufficient funding and expertise you can take their CPU core -- approximately as good as the performance cores in the Samsung Galaxy S8 or the Raspberry Pi 4 -- and without permission or payment or even notification use them in your own chips.