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Major League Baseball said its authorized gaming operators will cap bets on individual pitches at $200 and exclude them from parlays, a day after two Cleveland Guardians were indicted and accused of rigging pitches at the behest of gamblers.MLB said Monday the limits were agreed to by sportsbook operators representing more than 98% of the U.S. betting market. The league said in a statement that pitch-level bets on outcomes of pitch velocity and of balls and strikes “present heightened integrity risks because they focus on one-off events that can be determined by a single player and can be inconsequential to the outcome of the game.”“The risk on these pitch-level markets will be significantly mitigated by this new action targeted at the incentive to engage in misconduct,” the league said. “The creation of a strict bet limit on this type of bet, and the ban on parlaying them, reduces the payout for these markets and the ability to circumvent the new limit.”MLB said the agreement included Bally’s, Bet365, BetMGM, Bet99, Betr, Caesars, Circa, DraftKings, 888, FanDuel, Gamewise, Hard Rock, Intralot, Jack Entertainment, Mojo, Northstar Gaming, Oaklawn, Penn, Pointsbet, Potawatomi, Rush Steet and Underdog.Cleveland pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were indicted Sunday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn on charges they took bribes from sports bettors to throw certain types of pitches. They were charged with wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery and money laundering conspiracy. The indictment says they helped two unnamed gamblers in the Dominican Republic win at least $460,000 on bets placed on the speed and outcome of certain pitches, including some that landed in the dirt.Ortiz’s lawyer, Chris Georgalis, said in a statement that his client was innocent and “has never, and would never, improperly influence a game not for anyone and not for anything.” A lawyer for Clase, Michael J. Ferrara, said his client “has devoted his life to baseball and doing everything in his power to help his team win. Emmanuel is innocent of all charges and looks forward to clearing his name in court.”The U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 ruled the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 was unconstitutional, allowing states to legalize sports betting.Ortiz appeared Monday in federal court in Boston. U.S. Magistrate Judge Donald L. Cabell granted Ortiz his release on the condition he surrender his passport, restrict his travel to the Northeast U.S. and post a $500,000 bond, $50,000 of it secured. Ortiz was ordered to avoid contact with anyone who could be viewed as a victim, witness or co-defendant.Last month, more than 30 people, including Portland Trail Blazers head coach and Basketball Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, were arrested in a takedown of two sprawling gambling operations that authorities said rigged poker games backed by Mafia families and leaked inside information about NBA athletes.Billups’ attorney, Chris Heywood, issued a statement denying the allegations. Rozier’s lawyer, Jim Trusty, said in a statement his client is “not a gambler” and “looks forward to winning this fight.” AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB Ronald Blum, AP Baseball Writer
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Japanese technology giant SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its stake in Nvidia, raising $5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also reported its profit nearly tripled in the first half of this fiscal year from a year earlier.Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. said it sold the stake in Silicon Vally-based Nvidia in October, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.SoftBank reported its profit in April-September soared to about 2.5 trillion yen (about $13 billion). Its sales for the six month period rose 7.7% year-on-year to 3.7 trillion yen ($24 billion), it said.The company’s fortunes tend to fluctuate because it invests in a range of ventures, including through its tech-focused Vision Funds. Those recently have paid off.In February, SoftBank’s chairman Masayoshi Son joined Trump, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Larry Ellison of Oracle in announcing a major investment of up to $500 billion in a project to develop artificial intelligence called Stargate.SoftBank has invested tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI. The two companies also plan to provide AI services in Japan.Selling SoftBank’s stake in Nvidia reflects Son’s shift in strategy and also nets his company a healthy profit thanks to the recent runup in Nvidia’s market value.Nvidia recently become the first $5 trillion company, just three months after it broke through the $4 trillion barrier. It plans a $100 billion investment in OpenAI as part of a partnership that will add at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia AI data centers to ramp up OpenAI’s computing power.The chip maker and other winners in the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology have been driving much of this year’s rally in share prices. Critics say stock prices of the tech giants have soared too high and too fast in the mania around AI, drawing comparisons to the 2000 dot-com bubble that ultimately burst.SoftBank and Nvidia still have strong relations since various ventures that SoftBank invests in use Nvidia technology.SoftBank also has investments in Arm Holdings and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., computer chip makers that like Nvidia are benefitting greatly from the growth of AI.SoftBank stocks have nearly doubled in value in the past year. They gained nearly 2% Tuesday.Nvidia’s shares fell 1.3% in premarket trading early Tuesday. They jumped 5.8% on Monday. Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama Yuri Kageyama, AP Business Writer
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Amazon ushered in a new era for television advertising when it converted Prime Video into an ad-supported experience by default in 2024. By the middle of this year, some 130 million U.S. viewers were on Prime Videos ad tier, watching between four and six minutes of ads per hour, according to an Adweek report. The move is part of the companys long-term plan to dominate television advertising as viewership shifts from traditional broadcast and cable TV to streaming platforms. The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving with streaming TV becoming mainstream, says Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon DSP, the companys ad-buying platform. Under MacLean, Amazons been rolling out a slew of adtech tools to help businesses of all sizes reach viewers on Prime Video and even streaming rivals, including Netflix, NBCUniversal, and Disney. Amazons also helping with the creative side: It introduced an AI-powered video generator earlier this year that allows advertisers to easily create their own spots. Amazons investments are paying off. For the past decade, the companys cloud-computing arm, AWS, has been the engine powering Amazons dominance. AWS brought in $91 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2025, up 18% year over year. Amazon Ads is shaping up to be the next juggernaut: Its taken in $47 billion so far this year, and grew 24% last quarter. Jay Richman, Amazons vice president of creative experiences, says Amazon operates one of the most vast and sprawling ad networks on the planet. Amazon is now preparing to turn this sprawling network into a well-oiled machine with the help of generative AI. At its annual unBoxed conference, which is being held this week in Nashville, Amazon is unveiling a suite of agentic AI tools that will do everything from brainstorm creative concepts and produce video ads to advise advertisers of all sizes on where to place the finished campaigns for the most impact. The result, says Richman, is taking an advertising process that traditionally requires weeks of work and significant financial investment and transforming it into something that can be accomplished within a few hours at no additional cost to advertisers. Heres a look at whats coming. Unifying the streaming ad market Though other major tech companies, including Google and Meta, have been integrating AI in their advertising products to make certain tasks easier for ad buyers, Amazon is unique in positioning its DSP platform as the go-to place for buying television ads. Over the past two years, Amazon Ads has secured partnerships with major publishers including Netflix, Paramount, Fox Corp, NBCUniversal, Disney, and Roku, allowing advertisers to gain access to the partners inventory. The Disney and Roku partnerships were announced just in time for Cannes this past summer. In September, Amazon and Netflix announced a plan to offer programmatic buying on Netflixs Ads Plan. MacLean says that Amazon has been able to notch deals with every major streamereven its rivalsbecause its adding value for them through capabilities like Amazon Cloud Publisher, a service that helps streamers and others use Amazons data to make their ad inventory more valuable. Even as Amazon creates new tech and services to help publishers, it’s making it easier for a wide range of advertisersfrom big brands to small businessesto start running ads. And that begins by offering them a unified platform. Behind the scenes, MacLeans team has rebuilt the backend of Amazons ad platform to allow advertisers to buy targeted spots not on Amazons own properties and across the wider internet. MacLean says that Amazon is using AI to harness the trillions of signals it has about consumers shopping and viewing habits to help target the right people at the right time and on the right platform. A lot of advertisers are just dealing with mass fragmentation, MacLean says. They’re duplicating who they’re reaching. They’re wasting media dollars. So our focus has been on how to innovate and help marketers through these challenges, making it easier to distribute their ad spend in a way that can reach the right users. Introducing AI agents Amazon is showcasing its next slate of tools and services for digital and video advertisers at unBoxed this week. One of the new features is Campaign Manager, which unifies the ads console and Amazon DSP into an individual media buying tool, allowing advertisers of all sizes to manage their campaigns through one entry point. But the most groundbreaking new features take the form of agentic AI. The company has a new Creative Agent tool that will be integrated into the unified Amazon Ads console. Advertisers will be able to summon the tool via chat to make streaming and sponsored ads for television and elsewhere. Using natural language prompts, advertisers can ask the Creative Agent to conduct audience research, brainstorm concepts and create storyboards, and even produce display and video ads using generative AI. This is truly game-changing for the industry, allowing mid-market and small brands to design creative ad campaigns and professional-quality advertisements that were previously only accessible to large brands with substantial resources,” Richman says. Once those ads are complete, Amazons new Ads Agent tool, which can be accessed via a chat window throughout the Amazon Ads platform, offers recommendations on how advertisers can improve the efficacy of their campaigns. An advertiser, for example, could upload a custom media plan and let the tool configure all the campaign structures and the ad groupsor let it optimize all of the advertisers campaigns at scale using only natural language. The goal for every brand is reaching the right people wherever they are and having compelling ads that drive those business results, MacLean says. But with our vast offerings, we’ve heard from customers that they also need a more streamlined process. The Ads Agent tool is designed to be the specialist that can help simplify everything. Other products Amazon announced include Full-Funnel Campaigns, an agentic AI tool that will make advertising easier to launch and manage across multiple channels and formats, and sponsored product videos, which let advertisers showcase products within the Amazon store. Unlike traditional short video ads, these product videos will offer deeper demonstrations and highlight key features. Customers can browse between videos, skip to specific sections, and click through to the product detail page on Amazon for more informationcreting a more interactive and personalized shopping experience. The goal is to provide shoppers more information at a glance than is possible today with just static product shots, Richman says. MacLean says that the ultimate goal with all these tools is to make Amazon Ads the best place to buy advertising. Were going to continue to simplify, automate, and drive performance, she says. Amazon, it seems, is becoming the everything store for advertisers.
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