{"id":381005,"date":"2026-04-15T17:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T17:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/381005\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T17:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T17:18:08","slug":"allbirds-once-a-buzzy-shoe-startup-pivots-to-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/381005\/","title":{"rendered":"Allbirds, once a buzzy shoe startup, pivots to AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

The shoe brand that was once a favorite of the Silicon Valley tech scene<\/a> is moving away from footwear and onto what its wearers have been obsessing over the most: AI. <\/p>\n

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Allbirds announced on Wednesday<\/a> that it would be pivoting to focus on AI compute infrastructure, changing its name to \u201cNewBird AI.\u201d The company said it struck a $50 million agreement to fund the new venture.<\/p>\n

Shares in the company, which have struggled over the past year, shot up by more than 300%. <\/p>\n

Allbirds said in its release that it will use its initial capital to buy high-performance, low-latency graphics processing units \u2014 the hardware that powers AI\u2019s capabilities known as GPUs \u2014 to try to expand long term as a GPU-as-a-service and AI-native cloud solutions provider.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet,\u201d the company said in the release. \u201cNewBird AI is being built to help close that gap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once the trendy shoe among the tech elite, Allbirds failed to capitalize on its hot start<\/a> to become a major player in the shoe market, and the company\u2019s share price declined steadily starting in July 2025. Earlier this year, Allbirds closed all of its full-price retail stores<\/a> in the U.S., shifting completely to online sales.<\/p>\n

Late last month, Allbirds sold its brand and footwear assets to the management and licensing firm American Exchange Group for $39 million. American Exchange Group is known for brands like Ed Hardy and Mudd, as well as tech wearables.<\/p>\n

The shift to AI infrastructure comes at a time when demand for AI compute is at an all-time high, with AI companies racing to put out more and more models. <\/p>\n

But abrupt moves like this haven\u2019t gone down well in the past. In 2017, during a Bitcoin boom, Long Island Iced Tea shifted to cryptocurrency, changing its name to Long Blockchain. Later, the Securities and Exchange Commission delisted the company\u2019s shares<\/a> due to its failure to file financial documents. It also charged three people with insider trading<\/a> before the announcement of the Long Blockchain shift that had sent its shares jumping nearly 400%<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The shoe brand that was once a favorite of the Silicon Valley tech scene is moving away from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-381005","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}