I haven't heard of them until this comment, but reading through Wikipedia, and a techpowerup article, I'm not seeing that they actually own a license to manufacture x86 cpus freely. It seems like they were able to due to it being a partnership with AMD. I could easily be wrong though.

From my vague understanding I thought that Hygon is able to build atop Zen 1 IP that AMD gave Hygon, although they can't get anything newer because of restrictions on doing business with China.

Hygon still seems to be making x86 CPUs: https://www.techpowerup.com/336529/hygon-prepares-128-core-5....