The obvious reason for those chips being missing is because they are being mined with. It's funny the way none of you FUDsters can come up with a logical argument against this.
It might be good to stop this "black and white" thinking.
There are several nuances between "Labcoin is not hashing at all" and "Labcoin mines on a large scale". They say they are at an experimental stage, they say they are hashing and optimizing and we also know they are not yet on a productional scale.
I'm not claiming they're mining on a large scale, I'm just saying that the most plausible scenario for removing chips from the tray is to mine with those chips, After all, that's what they're designed for.