Japan’s biggest power generator is teaming up with Dell to build AI data centres across the country. The push could cost as much as $140bn, the Financial Times reported.

JERA, Dell and UK developer RHAELM signed a non-binding agreement on Thursday, JERA said. Private equity firm Apollo will help fund the work as RHAELM’s financing partner.

The first project sits next to JERA’s gas-fired power station in Chiba, east of Tokyo. It will draw about 400 megawatts and cost more than $15bn, or ¥2.3tn, across all phases.

Operations are due to start around 2028. The FT said the site would be among Asia’s largest outside China.

Skipping the grid queue

The plan’s selling point is speed. The data centre will take power straight from JERA’s plant, rather than wait years for a grid connection.

“We can deliver a 400MW facility years ahead of a conventional grid-connected timeline,” said Bradd Lewis, RHAELM’s chief executive.

Each firm has a set role. JERA brings the land and power, Dell supplies ready-built racks of servers, and RHAELM runs the build.

JERA says it generates about a third of Japan’s electricity.

“JERA is uniquely positioned to power Japan’s AI ambitions,” said Yukio Kani, its global chief executive.

The partners want to copy the model at other JERA sites. The aim is several gigawatts of AI capacity across Japan in the 2030s.

A crowded field

JERA has not put its own figure on that wider rollout. The $140bn estimate comes from the FT’s reporting.

Others are piling in too. In June, Blackstone said it planned $30bn for Japan AI data centres over the next few years.

Japan’s digital minister has warned the country could become an “AI colony” if it falls behind.

It’s been a while since we saw Catherine Zeta-Jones strutting her stuff in an action setting, but she’s back in this hard-hitting thriler series. Adapted from the Nick Harkaway novel, The Price You Pay, this adaptation, titled Kill Jackie, sees Zeta-Jones playing a wealthy art dealer with a hidden past that will come back to bite her.

As the squad of hitmen known as The Seven Demons close in, the titular Jackie uses her dark web connections and surprising brutality to tun the tables and hunt the killers for herself.

Here’s a fun history lesson for you. Don’t worry, we’ll make it quick! In 1966, nearly 51,000 people died on US highways. The overwhelming evidence suggested that many lives could have been saved with modern seat belts, which by then had been around for several years. The automotive industry responded by rallying together, and, in a triumph of self-regulation, voluntarily put the safety feature in every new vehicle that rolled off the line.

Kidding! Of course they didn’t do that. In the fall of 1966, Congress established the Department of Transportation and then passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act as well as the Highway Safety Act, giving the federal government sweeping new authority to set safety standards. By 1968, seat belts were required in every new car. Despite a massive increase in highway traffic in the last 60 years, far fewer fatalities happen on the road today.

I was thinking about this while watching various AI CEOs huddle around US president Donald Trump on Tuesday, congratulating themselves and each other on having signed an AI safety accord. My colleague Maddy Varner wrote about the specific stipulations here, but the short version is that it’s largely up to the AI labs to keep themselves in check.

Or, as Trump put it even more succinctly in the Oval Office on Wednesday: “They’re gonna police, and they’re gonna police each other, and they’re gonna self-police, they’re gonna police themselves. It’s going to work out very well.”

So this is the current state of AI safety regulation. On one side are the AI executives, employees, and tech luminaries, who are all saying that there need to be clear, thoughtful, tactical rules introduced to avoid potential disaster. (Bill Gates, for instance, has been on a media blitz playing Cassandra about an AI apocalypse.) On the other side is Trump’s magical thinking that if you say something enough times, it must be true.

That’s not to say any of this is simple or easy. The question of how to properly “pace the frontier,” as some of those same executives like to say, remains open. Even if all of the major AI labs were to agree to a slowdown, there’s no good way to keep them to their word, and China would likely continue on its own path regardless. The US economy is increasingly propped up on the AI industry, which itself has become an ouroboros of financing deals and circular investments; any meaningful crackdown risks major instability that reaches well beyond Silicon Valley.

The automotive industry is also admittedly an imperfect analogy for all kinds of reasons. There’s no seat belt equivalent for AI, no straightforward solution that can demonstrably reduce risk overnight. (It also took decades for the majority of states to pass laws mandating that people actually wear them.) The potential harms are less certain and less quantifiable. AI doomers will tell you the technology could result in human extinction in a decade; skeptics argue that’s sci-fi marketing malarkey.

A YouTuber has accidentally revealed at least some of what is coming in the Final Cut Pro 13 update, including improved Pixelmator Pro round-tripping and a new Natural Motion Blur tool.

Final Cut Pro 12.4 was released on September 29 with the ability to add Cinematic mode effects captured with iPhone 18 Pro. Apple’s next update could arrive sometime in October, given a recent accidental YouTube posting.

Reddit user Sweaty_Succotash_375 pointed out that YouTuber The Final Cut Bro accidentally posted then made a video private that touted “Final Cut 13 is here!” User umChiled shared a chapter list, which shows what features can be expected in the new update.

Here are the features called out in the chapter markers:

• More language support for transcriptions
• Pixelmator image roundtrip editing
• Natural Motion Blur
• Pinch to zoom and viewer controls
• Disconnect clips
• Keyframe easing

Several of these features appear to be long-awaited updates for Final Cut Pro. It’s a big update going to version 13, so Apple included several big changes.

It is already possible to send a frame to Pixelmator Pro, but only as a still image for editing. The new roundtrip improvement isn’t an export, but a frame editing tool that reinserts what you’ve edited.

Natural Motion Blur and Keyframe Easing both appear to be big features. Several animation tools have been added, which could mean vastly improved controls over objects in scenes.

Apple hasn’t announced Final Cut Pro 13, but new Macs, like a touchscreen MacBook Pro with OLED, are expected before the end of 2026. Expect the new Final Cut Pro update to be revealed at the same time.

Can Schools Trust AI Add-Ons?

Edtech vendors are swiftly integrating AI features into new and existing instructional materials, often claiming that the features are educationally effective. EdReports, an independent nonprofit that reviews K-12 curriculum, recently went looking for the evidence behind those claims. What it found raises hard questions for any district leader weighing an edtech purchase this fall.

What Happens When the Teacher Doesn’t Have a Say?

Some AI tools let a teacher review content before students see it, while others put that content directly in front of students in real time. Courtney Allison, the chief academic officer of EdReports, spent 15 years with the New York City Department of Education, including time as a middle school math teacher. She explains why the old line between core and supplemental materials is starting to disappear, and weighs in on AI tutors giving every student a different lesson. She also tackles whether it is fair to ask vendors for proof when generative AI has only been widely available for a few years.

A Former Chancellor in the Buyer’s Seat

Someone has to decide which AI products deserve a place in classrooms, and that responsibility often falls on districts. Dr. Lewis Ferebee joined EdReports as CEO this summer after becoming the longest serving chancellor in the history of DC Public Schools. He brings a district leader’s perspective to the question of who should be checking these products and who should pay for that work. He also shares the questions he would ask a vendor sitting across the table.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

AI in K-12 Instructional Materials: What We’re Seeing by EdReports

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.

The U.S. 4K Blu-ray player market has become fairly easy to understand. Panasonic still sells excellent conventional players, Magnetar will happily sell you something substantially more ambitious, and almost everyone else has either left the building or is standing suspiciously close to the exit.

Japan apparently did not get that memo.

Panasonic’s new DMR-4X1010 is not merely an Ultra HD Blu-ray player. It combines a 10TB internal hard drive, 11 television tuners, automatic multi-channel recording, Ultra HD Blu-ray playback and recording, cloud storage support, remote viewing and extensive program management inside one component.

In other words, Japan gets a 10TB home video command center, while America gets another notification asking whether we are still watching.

Related Reading:

This Is Not Just a 4K Blu-ray Player

Calling the DMR-4X1010 a disc player misses most of the point.

Panasonic has equipped its flagship new DIGA recorder with 10TB of internal storage and 11 tuners covering Japan’s terrestrial digital, BS/CS satellite and BS/110-degree CS 4K broadcasts. Eight tuners are dedicated to automatic recording, two can switch between automatic and conventional recording duties, and one is reserved for conventional recording.

With the appropriate recording settings, Panasonic says the DMR-4X1010 can automatically retain as many as eight HD channels for approximately 28 days, while an additional allocation can capture either one 4K channel for approximately 13 days or two additional HD channels for roughly the same period.

Older recordings can then be automatically deleted as space is required.

10TB Is Only the Beginning

The internal hard drive can store approximately 390 hours of native 4K broadcast material at 33Mbps, according to Panasonic. Longer-duration compression modes stretch that dramatically further, although image quality naturally becomes part of the trade-off.

Users can also archive compatible recordings to recordable Blu-ray media. The DMR-4X1010 supports BD-RE discs up to 100GB and BD-R media up to 128GB, along with recordable DVD formats.

That combination of enormous local storage and removable physical media already distinguishes the DIGA from virtually anything available to U.S. home theater buyers.

Panasonic then added the cloud.

Cloud Recording Without Surrendering Everything to Streaming

Panasonic describes one of the DMR-4X1010’s major new features as Cloud Recording, although the terminology requires some explanation.

The machine records television programming locally first. Selected recordings can then be copied to Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive, allowing users to free space on the internal hard drive, protect important recordings from a hardware failure and access stored programs remotely.

Panasonic says as much as 10TB of recorded programming can be stored in the cloud, subject, obviously, to whatever storage plan the user has purchased from Microsoft or Google.

Cloud-based recordings can also be viewed from a smartphone through Panasonic’s DIGA Anywhere app. Panasonic specifically cautions that cloud services can change, suffer outages or disappear entirely, so the feature should not be confused with guaranteed permanent archival storage.

Physical media just quietly cleared its throat.

The DMR-4X1010 also introduces playlist editing, allowing users to assemble favorite portions of recordings without deleting the original program, along with custom program tags for sorting material by performers, music or other criteria.

That sounds almost quaint until you remember how often a show disappears from a streaming service because somebody in a conference room changed a licensing agreement.

And Yes, It Still Plays 4K Blu-ray Discs

For all of the recording technology packed inside, the DMR-4X1010 remains a serious disc machine.

It supports Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, DVD-Video and CD playback, along with BD-R/RE and multiple recordable DVD formats. Panasonic also includes its 4K Real Chroma Processor, HDR brightness adjustment and 4K direct chroma upconversion.

High-resolution audio file playback includes WAV up to 32-bit/384kHz, AIFF up to 32-bit/384kHz, FLAC up to 24-bit/192kHz, ALAC up to 32-bit/192kHz and DSD up to 11.2MHz.

Connectivity includes two HDMI outputs, three USB ports, Ethernet and built-in Wi-Fi. There are no analog, optical or coaxial audio outputs, which tells you fairly clearly how Panasonic expects the DMR-4X1010 to be used.

Panasonic DMR-4X1010 Specifications

• Product Type: 4K Blu-ray recorder/DVR
• Internal Storage: 10TB HDD
• Tuners: 11 total
• Automatic Recording: Up to 8 HD channels for approximately 28 days
• Additional Automatic Recording: Up to 1 4K channel or 2 HD channels for approximately 13 days
• 4K Native Recording Capacity: Approximately 390 hours at 33Mbps
• Cloud Services: Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive
• Maximum Supported Cloud Recording Storage: 10TB
• Disc Playback: Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, DVD-Video, CD
• Recordable Blu-ray: BD-RE up to 100GB; BD-R up to 128GB
• Video Processing: 4K Real Chroma Processor, HDR brightness adjustment, 4K direct chroma upconversion
• Hi-Res Audio: WAV, FLAC, AIFF, ALAC, DSD
• HDMI Outputs: 2
• USB: 3; 1x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0
• Networking: Ethernet, built-in Wi-Fi
• Power Consumption: Approximately 54 watts
• Dimensions: 430 x 66 x 239 mm (16.9 x 2.6 x 9.4 inches)
• Weight: Approximately 4 kg (8.8 pounds)
• Power: AC 100V, 50/60Hz
• Japan Price: ¥434,500 including tax through Panasonic’s online channel
• Availability: Japan, late October 2026
• U.S. Availability: Not announced

The Bottom Line

The Panasonic DMR-4X1010 is unique because it combines an 11-tuner DVR, 10TB of local storage, recordable Blu-ray support, Ultra HD Blu-ray playback, cloud archiving, and remote viewing in one component. Very few manufacturers are still treating physical media, broadcast television, and local storage as parts of the same home entertainment system.

What is it missing? For North American buyers, the obvious answer is compatibility. The DMR-4X1010 is built around Japanese broadcast standards, uses B-CAS, runs on 100V power, and has no U.S. version announced.

That makes this a product Japanese home theater and physical media enthusiasts get to enjoy while the rest of us admire it from afar. Panasonic has built exactly the kind of all-in-one video machine many enthusiasts still want.

Price & Availability

Panasonic announced the DMR-4X1010 in Japan on September 14, 2026, with availability scheduled for late October 2026 at ¥434,500.

A less expensive DMR-4X410 version (¥209,000) reduces internal storage to 4TB while retaining 4K tuner capability and many of the same new cloud and organizational features.

There has been no announcement regarding U.S. or European availability.

Related Reading:

Lyft has agreed to pay $272.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the ride-hailing company of violating California law by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors, instead of employees.

The company said in a regulatory filing that it believes the settlement will allow it to avoid the “costs and distraction of protracted litigation and enable management to maintain its focus on executing its business objectives.”

Lyft could not be reached for comment.

The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by the California Labor Commissioner’s Office in August 2020 that accused Lyft of treating drivers as independent contractors rather than as employees, as required under state law at the time.

The lawsuit alleged that drivers were denied minimum wage and overtime as well as other benefits and protections provided to employees, including paid sick leave and timely wage payments.

“This settlement is about the workers who came forward and spoke up. Their voices made this outcome possible,” California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said in a statement, adding that the LCO will forgo its share of the settlement and direct those funds to drivers who filed wage claims.

The settlement, which still must be approved by a judge, covers alleged violations from April 6, 2016 to December 15, 2020 — a period California was grappling with whether workers in the booming gig economy were independent contractors or an employees.

Today, drivers for app-based transportation services like Lyft and Uber are classified as contractors after voters passed ballot measure Proposition 22 in 2020. The ballot measure provided a carve-out from Assembly Bill 5, a state law passed in 2019 that required companies like DoorDash, Lyft, and Uber to classify gig workers as employees, entitling them to minimum wage, workers’ compensation, and other benefits. 

Even after AB 5 took effect, Lyft, Uber, and other companies that relied on gig workers continued to classify their drivers as contractors. That eventually led to legal action from the LCO, California Attorney General and the City Attorneys of Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, as well as private actions filed under California’s Private Attorneys General Act. The cases were coordinated in San Francisco Superior Court in September 2021.

The settlement closes this legal chapter, at least for Lyft. Uber still faces an LCO lawsuit that makes similar allegations.

Financial markets have always relied on timely information, and the drive for timeliness has always adapted to the latest technology. From clipper ships transiting the oceans to telegraph wires connecting cities to fiber-optic cables conducting trades in microseconds, traders have embraced any advantage to get the most up-to-date information. Indeed, the history of finance is really a story about how fast you can move information and who controls the interface.

It’s only natural that people also figured out a way to profit by supplying that market intel. In 1841, for example, the Mercantile Exchange (predecessor to Dun & Bradstreet) began selling proprietary business information to its U.S. clients. The following decade, Paul Julius Reuter began selling news services and stock price information. To supplement the company’s telegraph dispatches, he sent pigeons between Aachen, Germany, and Brussels; each bird carried a cylinder containing slips of paper with that day’s stock prices. In 1867, an inventor named Edward Calahan introduced the first telegraphic ticker-tape machine, which spooled out stock price information in near real time; Thomas Edison improved upon the design with his patented version in 1871.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average debuted in 1896 as an index of 12 key businesses listed on U.S. stock exchanges. It included gas, oil, coal, and electric companies, as well as enterprises dealing in leather, rubber, and tobacco. Messengers delivered quotes from the trading floor to brokerage offices, while stock tickers kept investors informed of prices. By the time New York City held its first official ticker-tape parade, in 1919, telegraphy in Western Europe and the United States had become the chief means for quick transmission of vital stock information.

In 1960, the first paperless financial service debuted, when Quotron introduced its electronic screens for displaying market quotes. Over the next two decades, other companies rolled out similar innovations for distributing financial news and data.

So when Michael Bloomberg decided to enter this well-established industry in 1981, the big question was: How would his new company stand out?

The Birth of the Bloomberg Terminal

Bloomberg had cofounded Innovative Market Systems (IMS) after being fired from the investment bank Salomon Brothers. Landing on his feet with his US $10 million equity payout and joined by former Salomon colleagues Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan, and Charles Zegar, Bloomberg pursued his belief that Wall Street would pay a premium for specialized financial data. He’d earned an electrical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from Harvard, and he’d built computerized financial systems for Salomon. IMS focused on developing a computer terminal that not only provided up-to-date information but could also do instant quantitative analysis based on historical data.

Michael Bloomberg believed Wall Street would pay a premium for access to specialized financial data. Karjean Levine/Getty Images

At the time, most financial data still circulated through telephone calls, printed price sheets, and specialist publications, and analysis involved a fair amount of gut instinct guided by human expertise. Companies such as Reuters and Dow Jones provided subscription-based services for access to business news. But traders still had to assemble information from multiple sources and perform their own calculations and analysis.

IMS proposed an integrated system with a single interface. Its Market Master terminal consisted of a monochrome CRT monitor, a custom keyboard, and a communications/controller unit that connected to the company’s private network. At launch, it provided only U.S. government bond prices and bond-calculation tools, but the dream was much bigger: a dedicated terminal that would sit on a trader’s desk and run different market scenarios, produce yield curves, and support investment calculations.

IMS initially had just one client, Merrill Lynch, which invested $30 million (about $110 million today) in exchange for a 30 percent stake in the company and exclusive rights to the terminals for five years; Merrill waived that right in 1984. The first 22 Market Master terminals were delivered to Merrill in 1982, in the middle of a global recession. The timing was fortuitous. Worldwide, stock markets were transitioning to electronic trading, and the U.S. Federal Reserve was allowing more freely floating interest rates. Bond prices were more volatile, and investors were eager to figure out how to value them accurately. Bloomberg’s specialized financial terminals provided the data and the analytical tools to process and comprehend those sweeping changes.

Five years after its launch, IMS rebranded as Bloomberg LP and expanded its clientele, and the Market Master became known as the Bloomberg Terminal.

How Did the Bloomberg Terminal Work?

The Bloomberg Terminal’s keyboard was designed with traders and analysts in mind. The function keys were color-coded and given labels specifying their usage, so that users didn’t have to remember. The original keyboard, affectionately referred to as “the Chiclet,” was hand assembled. A cable ran from the keyboard to the Bloomberg Controller, which had a dedicated phone line to connect to a local hub. The internet wasn’t commercially available yet, so the company basically built its own closed network, with centralized computers that maintained large databases and performed most of the calculations. Commands entered on the keyboard sent a request to the hub, which processed the information and sent back the result.

The Chiclet keyboard for the Bloomberg Terminal was introduced around 1983. Although it looks like a generic keyboard, its function keys were finance-specific hot keys.National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution

Hot keys let traders easily call up data on government securities, corporate debt, and currency markets, among other things. A series of keystrokes would pull up other historical and real-time data, run an analysis, or place a trade. Learning how to use the terminal and digest the vast amount of information, which was presented mostly in tabular form, became a rite of passage for users.

In 1990, Bloomberg added a trackball to the keyboard, which helped the user navigate the multiple windows and menus typically displayed on screen. Two years later, the keyboard gained a built-in speaker, to support multimedia information; this design also included telephone, headphone, and microphone jacks. One of the most popular features was Instant Bloomberg, which allowed users to chat directly with fellow Bloomberg Terminal users over the proprietary network. By 1996, Bloomberg had keyboards that supported 23 different languages. In the early 2000s, the company began incorporating biometric authentication for terminal login, via a fingerprint reader on the keyboard.

As the company’s business model evolved, the Bloomberg Terminal added services well beyond its initial offerings. In 1990, for example, worried that Dow Jones would stop providing access to its news stories, Bloomberg set up its own news service. It recruited Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Winkler to oversee a dozen reporters; their stories on market and securities movements used graphs and calculations that served as advertisements for the terminal’s capabilities. These days, the Bloomberg news empire includes Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Radio, and Bloomberg Television.

Bloomberg’s subscription-based financial model included the leasing of a Bloomberg Terminal with its specialized keyboard and other hardware, access to a dedicated private network, and a suite of services. In 1999, a subscription to a single Bloomberg Terminal cost $1,600 per month with a minimum two-year contract and a discount on each additional terminal. Today the annual price is upwards of $32,000 (trending a little below inflation). In 1995, the company launched a suite of “Open Bloomberg” software products that ran on the customer’s own PC; five years later, it stopped leasing dedicated terminals. Current customers also have access to mobile applications that allow terminal functions to run on phones and tablets. Today, “Bloomberg Terminal” has come to refer to the integrated data, analytics, news, communications, and trading environment.

The Legacy of the Bloomberg Terminal

Although the shift away from dedicated terminals was a logical response to the rise of the internet and publicly available market data, it altered the material culture of financial work. For nearly two decades, Bloomberg Terminals commanded an aura of power and financial prowess. They were emblems of market mastery, with a brand that was distinct from other office computers. With Open Bloomberg, users were no longer tied to a single desk or a fixed set of monitors.

And so, cast-off Bloomberg Terminals found their way into museum collections. They’re a physical embodiment of the ethereal nature of financial markets, and a manifestation of mathematical calculations, network infrastructure, and business culture.

The Bloomberg keyboard used by “Bond King” Bill Gross has his login and password taped on the front.National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History has a number of Bloomberg keyboards in its collection, but my favorite is object number 2014.0012.02, which was used by “Bond King” Bill Gross during the 1990s and 2000s at Pacific Investment Management. Gross had cofounded PIMCO in 1971 and built it into a $2 trillion bond investment firm. I especially love that Gross taped his login and password directly on his keyboard, which makes the object more relatable. I may never know what it’s like to manage billions in assets from a Bloomberg Terminal, but I absolutely understand the trial of remembering my passwords.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the October 2026 print issue as “The Keyboard That Moved Markets.”