The problem with that theory is that it would mean Avalon paid $0 to actually buy the chips.

Yifu said there were 1m chips, with 200k "stuck in customs"
If you assume there are 135 boxes, with three inner boxes each it comes to 1.05m chips  (you can only see 3 inner boxes in the photos)
The payments to that address are about the cost of 1m chips.

So all of the evidence is consistent with the existence of 1m chips.

Additionally, if there really were 2.1 million chips made those chips could not be hashing, since that would be over 700PH/s .