Perhaps a second hand SP50!?
Have to find a NEW SP50 around somewhere first - so far as anyone knows outside of Spondoolies themselves or possibly someone under NDA, they seem to not be in existance or production yet.
There has been NO announcement on price on the things anywhere public that I'm aware of (I've looked), just quite a bit of speculative guessing.
While 7 cents/KWH (US) is fairly cheap, it's not VERY cheap or even close. 5.54 is getting close to the VERY cheap range, but definitly is not VERY VERY cheap 3 cent/KWH or less like most of the major farms seem to have access to - and if you expect to be profitable for the long term you've got to get at least fairly close to their ballpark.
Yes, you are right, the SP50 are only available to large well funded projects (just confirmed with the website). Perhaps by September there might be one second hand, but as you say there is no price available, and the official sales team wouldn't give me one either haha! So I guess I am stuck with the S7's for now, unless a new miner comes out by September.
Also, I have no idea why the S7 with power supply are being sold for so much by other companies? In UK average price is around 1500-1800 pounds per S7 unit with power supply. BUT, if I ordered from the official Bitmain website, it would only cost $986.34/655.92 pounds (batch 9) and even with VAT and duty import charges that is still only around 200 pounds extra (855.92 pounds) and they only charge 52 dollars for shipping! With the pound to dollar conversion, I would be saving a lot of money.
THAT IS LIKE 644.08 POUNDS CHEAPER! People on ebay are literally outbidding each other well into the 1000 + pounds area. Lol, people really over estimate the prices from the official company. Although for some reason the batch 9 is cheaper than the batch 3.
Looks like India would be cheapest electrcity! I'm going to email energy companies there for quotes and research just how unstable the supply is and in general how corrupt it is.
I'm not even sure I would count of SP50 at this point. Bitfury beat them to the chip dev it seems. So SP team has a chip that uses twice as much as bitfury.... and they have not shown a single chip that I know of. So they might have lost the war before SP50 comes out, unless they can beat bitfury's price by a lot.
And keep in mind they went head to head with bitmain during sp20 and S5 day's. They reported loss twords end of it. So I don't see them trying to go head to head with another company's price again.