friedcat was already unable to deploy chips after he maxed out his DC in china with Gen 1.
The fabled immersive DC was built and never used.
Umm. I don't think friedcat was unable to deploy chips; rather the experience of self-mining vs quick wins of selling Gen 1 chips tilted the strategy towards selling future chips. Maybe he should have kept some flexibility, especially when Gen 2 failed and it became clear that Gen 3 was coming a bit late to the party.
The immersion DC was populated with Gen1 chips, up to the point where Gen 1 became unprofitable.
I dont see AM climbing out from under the thumb of Bitfury+GHash.io who seem to keep an insane amount of hashing power in reserve so they can squash all profitibility of any other mining company by switching them on as the other companies (ie AM) deploy.
Why do you would think that? If they had all that hash power and deployment opportunities available, they could deter R&D investments by other asic manufacturers, capture a larger share of the mining rewards, and start up an anonymous alternate pool (taking the 50% heat off ghash.io),