In defense of that proposal - keep in mind that
HashFast liquidated assets (or still are, no idea). Their boards (well, their chips with maybe updated boards) ended up being used in e.g. Pepper Mining's Habanero (you can poke at MrTeal on that ) and Bitcrane's T-110 and T-720. From bankruptcy documents, they certainly claimed to have plenty of assets left over to build miners; don't recall if "1000's" applies, though

Not the first time its happened, won't be the last. When you put down such a huge chunk of money upfront in huge batches of chips, its not surprising that some companies simply don't have the money to turn them into miners once they arrive. Even ASICMiner did that on BE200, all the miners we saw sold over a 12 month period were from the same batch!