That's the question, is it 100K wafers or 100K chips? 100K chips is not even one lot of 25 wafers if it were bm1387-sized chips, so that's a debug run or metal split or something.
100K wafers on the other hand is a stupidly large order, on the order of one billion chips in 4000 lots. The upfront cost would be quite staggering, especially if it were expedited to TSMC's highest priority as suggested by the mention of urgency.
That's what I was trying to get my head around, the possibility that it is the actual number of wafers... I mean, SkyNet probably used less to destroy the world.
I wouldn't be surprised though if BitMain could actually handle that serious frontend cost, they've made quite a profit just in only taking BCH and running that racket.
Yes, surprisingly they are releasing next batch of S9 today... I'm curious when they will come out with 12nm because if the news about new miner come out, nobody would buy S9 now...