Allbirds, a struggling apparel and footwear brand, announced a bizarre pivot to AI data centers after selling its core business to American Exchange Group, sending its shares shyrocketing 580% in a single day. The company said that it has come to a “definitive agreement” with an institutional investor who will give the company a $50-million infusion through a convertible financing facility expected to close during the second quarter of 2026. This should give it enough funding to become a “GPU-as-a-service” and AI cloud solutions provider, allowing it to join the AI bandwagon and ride the wave of popularity of AI data centers. It also anticipates changing its name from Allbirds to NewBird AI, signaling its intent to do a complete reversal of its business direction.
“NewBird AI expects to use initial capital from the Facility to acquire high-performance GPU assets, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity,” Allbirds said in its announcement. “NewBird AI’s long-term vision is to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. Over time, the Company intends to grow its neocloud platform by expanding its compute and service offerings, deepening partnerships with operators and customers, and evaluating strategic M&A opportunities.”
Despite various experts and industry leaders' concerns of an AI bubble, it seems that Allbirds (or Newbird AI) and its investor see an opportunity to break into AI infrastructure. It said that even as the AI infrastructure build-out is going at a breakneck pace, data center vacancies in the U.S. are at historic lows, and even compute capacity slated to come online through the first half of the year is already fully committed. So, it plans to take advantage of the situation and deliver computing power that the spot market and hyperscalers are currently unable to meet.
This isn’t the first company to join the bandwagon of a lucrative new industry after seeing its fortunes fail in its current market. We saw this with Bitfarm, a major Bitcoin mining firm, which announced that it will fully abandon crypto mining by 2027 and leverage its existing infrastructure to become an AI data center and offer GPUaaS to interested clients. Bitfarm’s business is somewhat related to AI data centers, so this pivot makes sense. But because Allbirds comes from a completely different segment, this announcement came as a shock to everyone.
Aside from the press release, there is no clear direction or plan from the company yet on how it intends to achieve its goal of building its own data center. Even then, the company’s stock price skyrocketed from an average trading price of around $2.50 and peaked at more than $23 before settling at around $18 at the time of writing. This is a massive upside for a company that, just a few months ago, closed all its full-price stores in the U.S. and saw its sales fall by 50% in the past three years.
