[IncRnd]

It is absolutely risky. Your facilities can burn down once the ASICs arrive and before they are turned on, or your employees simply steal them for their own uses. Heck, you can have a fire once they get powered-on, because a power cable was poorly made. You might get sent the wrong product, or you could be ghosted without a delivery.

Expensive is a better fit than capital intensive, because there are massive ongoing costs to actually perform the attack, electricity for one.

If you want to understand the risks for a project, pretend you are at arms length and are being asked to fund the project 100% up-front. You'll find a huge list of risks very soon.

[zamadatix]

This is why I didn't say it made the investment risk free, I said being capital intensive does not make something (inherently) risky. There is no such thing as an investment without risk, but how risky it is is largely orthogonal to how capital intensive it is, and the above was talking about the latter so using the term "risk" for that half is not a great correction.