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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
Category:
E-Commerce
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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E-Commerce
It’s up to the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress to decide when full payments will resume under the SNAP food aid program that helps 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries, as some wonder how they will feed their families without government assistance.The Supreme Court is expected to rule Tuesday on a request from President Donald Trump’s administration to keep blocking states from providing full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, arguing the money might be needed elsewhere.The seesawing rulings mean that beneficiaries in some states, including Hawaii and New Jersey, have received their full monthly allocations while in others, such as Nebraska and West Virginia, they have received nothing.The legal wrangling could be moot if the U.S. House adopts and Trump signs legislation to quickly end the federal government shutdown. An urgent need for beneficiaries The cascading legal rulings plus the varying responses of each state to the shutoff means people who rely on SNAP are in vastly different situations. Some have all their benefits, some have none. In states including North Carolina and Texas, beneficiaries have received partial amounts.In Pennsylvania, full November benefits went out to some people on Friday. But Jim Malliard, 41, of Franklin, said he had not received anything by Monday.Malliard is a full-time caretaker for his wife, who is blind and has had several strokes this year, and his teenage daughter, who suffered severe medical complications from surgery last year.That stress has only been compounded by the pause in the $350 monthly SNAP payment he previously received for himself, his wife and daughter. He said he is down to $10 in his account and is relying on what’s left in the pantry mostly rice and ramen.“It’s kind of been a lot of late nights, making sure I had everything down to the penny to make sure I was right,” Malliard said. “To say anxiety has been my issue for the past two weeks is putting it mildly.”The political wrangling in Washington has shocked many Americans, and some have been moved to help.“I figure that I’ve spent money on dumber stuff than trying to feed other people during a manufactured famine,” said Ashley Oxenford, a teacher who set out a “little food pantry” in her front yard this week for vulnerable neighbors in Carthage, New York. SNAP has been the center of an intense fight in court The Trump administration chose to cut off SNAP funding after October due to the shutdown. That decision sparked lawsuits and a string of swift and contradictory judicial rulings that deal with government power and impact food access for some 42 million Americans.The administration went along with two rulings on Oct. 31 by judges who said the government must provide at least partial funding for SNAP. It eventually said recipients would get up to 65% of their regular benefits. But it balked last week when one of the judges said it must fund the program fully for November, even if that means digging into funds the government said need to be maintained in case of emergencies elsewhere.The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to pause that order.An appeals court said Monday that full funding should resume, and that requirement is set to kick in Tuesday night unless the top court takes action again. Congressional talks about reopening government The U.S. Senate on Monday passed legislation to reopen the federal government with a plan that would include replenishing SNAP funds.Speaker Mike Johnson told members of the House to return to Washington to consider the deal a small group of Senate Democrats made with Republicans.Trump has not said whether he would sign it if it reaches his desk, but told reporters at the White House on Sunday that it “looks like we’re getting close to the shutdown ending.”If the deal is finalized, it’s not clear how quickly SNAP benefits might start flowing.Still, the Trump administration said in a Supreme Court filing Monday that it shouldn’t be up to the courts.“The answer to this crisis is not for federal courts to reallocate resources without lawful authority,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in the papers. “The only way to end this crisis which the Executive is adamant to end is for Congress to reopen the government.” Associated Press reporter Cara Anna in Carthage, New York, contributed. Geoff Mulvihill and Margery Beck, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
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