Allbirds, once a buzzy shoe startup, pivots to AI

Artificial intelligenceAllbirds, once a buzzy shoe startup, pivots to AIThe company's share price shot up more than 300% on the news, offering some sense of the ongoing excitement for AI investments.Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00A shopper carries an Allbirds bag in New York in 2019. Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images fileShareAdd NBC News to GoogleApril 15, 2026, 12:15 PM EDTBy Bruna HorvathThe shoe brand that was once a favorite of the Silicon Valley tech scene is moving away from footwear and onto what its wearers have been obsessing over the most: AI. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Allbirds announced on Wednesday that it would be pivoting to focus on AI compute infrastructure, changing its name to “NewBird AI.” The company said it struck a $50 million agreement to fund the new venture.Shares in the company, which have struggled over the past year, shot up by more than 300%. Allbirds said in its release that it will use its initial capital to buy high-performance, low-latency graphics processing units — the hardware that powers AI’s capabilities known as GPUs — to try to expand long term as a GPU-as-a-service and AI-native cloud solutions provider.“The rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet,” the company said in the release. “NewBird AI is being built to help close that gap.”Once the trendy shoe among the tech elite, Allbirds failed to capitalize on its hot start to become a major player in the shoe market, and the company’s share price declined steadily starting in July 2025. Earlier this year, Allbirds closed all of its full-price retail stores in the U.S., shifting completely to online sales.Late last month, Allbirds sold its brand and footwear assets to the management and licensing firm American Exchange Group for $39 million. American Excha...