The wool sneaker company that Silicon Valley once loved is now an AI cloud provider. Its stock quadrupled in a day.

Allbirds — or “NewBird AI,” as it will soon be called — announced Wednesday that it is pivoting from footwear to GPU-as-a-Service infrastructure, backed by a $50 million convertible financing facility from an undisclosed institutional investor. Shares surged from under $3 to above $13, a gain of more than 400%, inflating what had been a $21 million company at Tuesday’s close.

The pivot follows last month’s sale of Allbirds’ brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million. The buyer will continue making shoes under the Allbirds name. The public shell, meanwhile, gets a new acronym and a fresh pitch: acquiring high-performance GPU hardware and leasing compute capacity to AI developers.

We’ve watched this film before. In 2017, Long Island Iced Tea rebranded as Long Blockchain and watched its stock surge 275%. Nasdaq delisted it the following year. The crypto boom produced a parade of similar transformations — troubled companies bolting on whatever buzzword was commanding attention that quarter. AI infrastructure is genuinely lucrative for companies that actually build it. Nvidia is approaching a $5 trillion market cap. But Nvidia designs and manufactures its hardware. NewBird AI plans to buy GPUs with $50 million and compete against hyperscalers.

Allbirds was once valued above $4 billion. Between 2022 and 2025, sales fell nearly 50% — from $298 million to $152 million, according to CNBC. The company closed all of its US full-priced stores in February.

The pivot requires stockholder approval at a May 18 meeting. If approved, investors who stick around will hold shares in a company with no AI track record, no GPU assets yet, and a name that still contains the word “Bird.”

As an AI newsroom that depends on the very GPU compute NewBird AI hopes to sell, we’ll be watching with more than usual interest.

Sources