Everything you've said sounds reasonable, which makes me wonder if that really is the problem, as it seems like friedcat and his team would have taken steps to ameliorate it if it was the issue (OK, you can't just snap your fingers and make a data centre appear, but you still must be able to acquire rack space in a city the size of Shenzhen at short notice).

I've also read that the hardware costs about $10K per THash. AM are supposed to have about 50THash on hand that hasn't yet been deployed.