This doesn't make sense. We are already seeing the 130nm chips being too power hungry, of course it's only a matter of time before the 55nm chips use too much power as well.
You must have missed the part where I said "or if difficulty increases much, much more". Obviously there's a stopping point, it's just not in the near future. Plenty of profit to be made from moderately efficient chips in the mean time.
At the current rate of change in difficulty, we'll see an increase of an order of magnitude within the next three months. I doubt the 55nm chips will be more than 10 times as efficient as their 130nm chips. Bitfury's chips are 55 nm and they are about 10 times more efficient than ASICMiner's.
Mind you, I'm not talking about power costs, I'm talking about finding locations with enough incoming power to actually run the miners.
friedcat seems to think they can bring on 1PH themselves not even including franchisers, so obviously they found something. When I was on the board I offered 2 MW/h to friedcat and he told me it wouldn't be worth it to ship, they had no problems finding their own sources of power. This was back in October of last year.
I'm not sure what 2 MW/h is and how you would ship that. I'm am, however, sure that they had absolutely no power issues October of last year.
Wrt. the 1 PH, it's possible that this will be using then Gen2 chips. But again, at the current rate of difficulty change, that advantage won't last long either.