Host club manager Hide Kurosaki dropped the iced coffee he was holding when he learned that the credit-card processor for his establishment had gone under. “My first thought was, ‘Wait, what — that’s the company we use,’” said Kurosaki, 45, who runs the Century Tokyo Shinjuku in the back alleys of Kabukicho, the city’s red-light district. He feared the club wouldn’t be able to collect card-based p...
Host club manager Hide Kurosaki dropped the iced coffee he was holding when he learned that the credit-card processor for his establishment had gone under. “My first thought was, ‘Wait, what — that’s the company we use,’” said Kurosaki, 45, who runs the Century Tokyo Shinjuku in the back alleys of Kabukicho, the city’s red-light district. He feared the club wouldn’t be able to collect card-based payments, which make up around 40% of sales. “How was I going to explain this to the staff?” The sudden bankruptcy of Zentoshin Co. , an Osaka-based processor of credit payments, has ensnared its clients — mainly bars, clubs and restaurants — as well as the regional banks that backed the firm. Many of the outlets that relied on Zentoshin are now asking customers to pay in cash or with a QR code payment, as they seek to line up another provider. Though the impact is limited, it’s a setback for Japan, which only recently shed its notorious cash-only image. Century Tokyo, located in a building wrapped in giant LED screens featuring polished images of young men and women, is one of the numerous clubs where virtually all of the clientele are women who pay to be entertained by male hosts . A leather-padded elevator carries visitors to the sixth floor into a nightlife economy where the cover charge is ¥21,000 and the cheapest drink costs ¥3,000. Read More: Japan Is Cracking Down on Host Clubs Where Men Flirt for Money Kurosaki, who sports a Rolex Daytona and was himself a former host, was out for a walk earlier this week when he saw news of Zentoshin’s failure on his smartphone. The timing couldn’t have been worse, coming soon after the end of the prior month, when the club pulls in the most revenue. Roughly a quarter of the ¥70 million ($430,000) in receipts during June was paid by credit card, according to the club manager. After calling his accountant, Kurosaki learned that Zentoshin had wired over June’s credit-card payments four days earlier than usual on July 6, the same day ...
BlackJack3D AI chip startup Positron is in discussions to raise about $750M in financing during a round with two phases, being among the group of companies seeking to compete with AI chip giant Nvidia ( NVDA ), Bloomberg News reported. The first tranche of the round is expected to value the company at $3.5B, while the second phase could see a valuation of about $5B, the report noted , citing peopl...
BlackJack3D AI chip startup Positron is in discussions to raise about $750M in financing during a round with two phases, being among the group of companies seeking to compete with AI chip giant Nvidia ( NVDA ), Bloomberg News reported. The first tranche of the round is expected to value the company at $3.5B, while the second phase could see a valuation of about $5B, the report noted , citing people with knowledge of the matter. Positron, which develops energy-efficient chips for AI inference, has already received several term sheets for the round. If the funding is secured, the startup would see its valuation more than triple in just five months, the report added. AI inference is a process where a trained AI model uses its learned knowledge to make predictions or conclusions on new, unseen data. Positron did not immediately respond to Seeking Alpha's request for comment. In February, Positron said it raised $230M in a Series B financing at a post-money valuation exceeding $1B. The funding round included investments from Qatar Investment Authority and Arm ( ARM ). Cerebras Systems ( CBRS ), which also makes chips for inference, had one of the year’s biggest IPOs in May. More on Nvidia Nvidia: It's About To Get Much Worse Nvidia: The Outlier In AI Remains A Buy Nvidia: Jensen's Anti-ASICs Alliance (Rating Downgrade) Nvidia in focus as Nemotron 3 Ultra AI model surpasses closed models in cost Nvidia flashes buy signals at decade-low valuation - 22V
Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983 and seeing new generations succumb to its bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75. Tyler died “unexpectedly” in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said on Thursday in a...
Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983 and seeing new generations succumb to its bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75. Tyler died “unexpectedly” in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said on Thursday in a statement on her website. She was hospitalised in May in Faro, where she had a home, for emergency...
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (Clarity Act) continues to draw its fair share of skeptics as it moves through the arduous process of becoming law. One of the most vocal critics is Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) , who has argued that some of the legislation's stablecoin rules could "blow up" the system. So what is it about stablecoins that the traditional banking industry does...
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (Clarity Act) continues to draw its fair share of skeptics as it moves through the arduous process of becoming law. One of the most vocal critics is Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) , who has argued that some of the legislation's stablecoin rules could "blow up" the system. So what is it about stablecoins that the traditional banking industry doesn't like? It's not that Jamie Dimon is against the concept of stablecoins , which are simply "digital dollars." After all, JPMorgan Chase has already experimented with tokenized deposits, programmable money, and other innovations made possible by decentralized finance (DeFi) . The growing consensus is that stablecoins can enable faster payments, shorter settlement times, and more streamlined cross-border money flows. Continue reading
STORY: From Samsung's huge quarter to Microsoft's big lay offs... This is AI Weekly. :: AI Weekly Samsung flagged a 19-fold jump in second-quarter profits from a year earlier. The South Korean giant estimated April-June operating profit at just over $58 billion - ahead of analyst projections. The global AI boom drove huge demand for Samsung's chips, and sent prices for silicon sky-high. Although i...
STORY: From Samsung's huge quarter to Microsoft's big lay offs... This is AI Weekly. :: AI Weekly Samsung flagged a 19-fold jump in second-quarter profits from a year earlier. The South Korean giant estimated April-June operating profit at just over $58 billion - ahead of analyst projections. The global AI boom drove huge demand for Samsung's chips, and sent prices for silicon sky-high. Although investors wiped more than $80 billion off the firm's market value after the results were announced over worries about how long the AI bonanza will last. China plans to allow its top AI firms to buy a limited number of Nvidia's most powerful AI chip, the H200. That's according to a report from The Information. It said Chinese officials recently told local leaders Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek they may soon get permission to buy some of the chips. Beijing has until now withheld approval of buying the H200 as it looks to support domestic suppliers. Microsoft said it will cut more than 2% of its workforce, or roughly 4,800 jobs. It joins a wave of layoffs at tech titans as they move investments to AI infrastructure. Booming AI demand has powered growth at Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing business. But the growing cost of building data centers to run those services has hit cash flows. And sources told Reuters China's DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip. It could lower its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei chips which is needed to train and run its AI models. The sources said the chip is designed for inference, rather than for training new models. Inference is the stage of AI computing where a trained model generates responses for users. DeepSeek didn't respond to a request for comment.