At $8 per GH that would be $216,000,000 in hardware. (Monarch & Cointerra)
At $15 per GH that would be $405,000,000 in hardware. (Hashfast)
At $20 per GH that would be $540,000,000 in hardware. (Bitfury October)
At $50 per GH that would be $1,350,000,000 in hardware (BFL, AsicMiner, Avalon, Bitfury August).
Possible but unlikely.
That does seem high. How do you get those numbers?
Yeah, but you have to consider the marginal cost for people who already have chips. Labcoin estimates it'll cost them about $2/Gh/s to add capacity. Once the masksets are done for the 28nm chips they'll likely be able to add capacity for far less. Maybe even 50 cents per GH.
With HashFast's 4x miner protection plan, they expect they'll be able to make a profit for $15/5 = $3/Gh (since they'll have to send 4x chips for every one chip they sell)
So that's just $81m at HashFast's "Miner Protection Plan" cost.
Or $51m at Labcoin's claimed 130nm chip cost.
Total amount of bitcoins mined a year is worth about $130m I think. So it could potentially be profitable to create that many chips. Plus companies don't know about eachother's plans.