Allbirds sells its shoes, renames itself Smartbird, and says it is now an AI infrastructure company

Allbirds, the sustainable footwear company that went public at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021, has officially renamed itself Smartbird and appointed a new chief executive to lead its pivot into AI compute. Shares surged more than 50% on Wednesday morning before pulling back.

The rebrand completes a transformation first announced in April, when the company said it would sell its shoe business for $39 million and become a GPU cloud provider called NewBird AI. That announcement sent the stock up 582% in a single session, though it gave back most of those gains within weeks.

New name, new boss, no shoes

Smartbird has appointed Nadia Carlsten as president and CEO. Carlsten previously ran DCAI, the Danish Centre for AI Innovation, where she launched Denmark’s first AI supercomputer, Gefion, in partnership with Nvidia.

Before DCAI, she spent three years at Amazon Web Services, where she helped launch Amazon’s quantum computing service. She also worked at Google spinoff SandboxAQ and holds an engineering doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

Carlsten replaces Joe Vernachio, who has resigned from the company and its board. In an interview with Business Insider, she said she was “blissfully unaware of all things Allbirds” and predicted that “in a few months, people won’t even remember the shoes.”

The neocloud play

Smartbird plans to provide dedicated AI infrastructure as a managed service, leasing GPU compute to enterprise customers under long-term arrangements. It doubled its convertible financing facility from $50 million to $100 million to fund the strategy, though the convertible structure means existing shareholders face potential dilution.

The pitch places Smartbird in a crowded field. CoreWeave, which pivoted from crypto mining to GPU cloud in 2019, will join the Nasdaq-100 later this month with a valuation above $40 billion, but it spent years building infrastructure before reaching that point.

Nscale, another crypto-to-AI neocloud, hit a $14.6 billion valuation in March after signing deals with Nvidia and Microsoft. Former Bitcoin miner IREN secured a $2.1 billion Nvidia warrant as part of a five-gigawatt data centre deal, but it too had existing infrastructure to repurpose.

Smartbird has none of that. It said it is “in active discussions with prospective customers” and “currently designing its first cluster deployments,” which means it has no data centres, no customers, and no revenue in its new business.

Echoes of the blockchain bubble

The pattern is familiar. In 2017, Long Island Iced Tea rebranded as Long Blockchain Corp, saw its stock jump nearly 300%, and was later delisted from Nasdaq and hit with SEC insider-trading charges.

Market analysts have drawn parallels between AI stock valuations and the dot-com bubble, with the S&P 500’s cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio sitting near levels last seen in March 2000. Whether Smartbird can avoid a similar fate depends on whether it can build a real business from zero.

A Nasdaq listing and $100 million in convertible financing is a head start over a startup. But it is a long way from a working data centre, paying customers, or a competitive moat in a market already dominated by well-funded neoclouds and hyperscalers.