28 Th/s would be a drop in a bucket...
Agreed. The Nov preorders will be two orders of magnitude more. It is likely the "left overs". They ordered so many hosts, cases, etc, used their inventory of parts to build the Sept/Oct/Nov orders and they came up with 200 extra boards. Sell off the lot. Why not? The value of ASICs goes down over time. Why wait for the next batch just sell them off for less?
It was always the case of what volume of RMAs would occur once shipping commenced being an unknown. Also if there was to be any yield issue beyond firmware, so there was in essence a float of modules kept.
Now that's complete, the surpless can be sold as the promised upgrades, and priced fairly.
Any idea when they start shipping batch#2??
As planned, nothing's changed in the timeline as far as I'm personally aware, around mid-Nov, which is almost here, the facility will start production again, with everything set for a Nov delivery. I'm not stupid enough to make any promises myself as I cannot be arsed with dealing with the flack again, and I never made any last time!