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This means that miners in these areas operate with a 1500% profit after buying hardware equipment (1500% is computed with current price of 1btc=$16000 and the break-even point at 1btc=$1k). So are they scaling up and buying more hardware as fast as they can?

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Yep, the best ASIC Bitcoin mining hardware is almost always sold out... at least until a new better ASIC comes out.

and the grapevine says that they are mostly refurbs from actual mining operations that already have a new unpublicized version running.

Right...why would this middleman sell them? Use them for your own operations!

They've earned the investment back many times over and the newer devices are 2-4x as efficient, probably?

There have been several instances where the manufacturer mines with each manufactured device for a few months "for quality assurance purposes" (enriching themselves at lower difficulty levels, and then shipping after they've pushed difficulty up).

The large mining operations all own factories that build the ASICs.

To put it mildly, that seems pretty unlikely given the ridiculous amount of know-how and capital investment required for chip manufacturing.

Might not be that would-be miners are acquiring that know-how, might be that people with the know-how tend to get into mining.

He's probably talking about the ASIC design, not the manufacturing.

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