Allbirds Spikes More Than 350% On Pivot From Sneakers To Ai

• Allbirds is trading shoes for GPUs and the stock is soaring.
• The sneaker company announced it's pivoting to AI, rebranding itself as NewBird AI.
• The company will focus on providing GPU compute-as-a-service.

What's All is New.

Allbirds, once the go-to shoemaker for finance and tech bros coast to coast, is now NewBird AI, and its stock is seeing a wild rally on the pivot.

Shares exploded higher by as much as much as 360%, to $11.47 after closing at $2.49 on Tuesday.

The sneaker company announced a definitive agreement to sell the Allbirds brand and its footwear assets on Wednesday for $50 million. With its shoe business behind it, the company will focus on rebuilding itself as an AI infrastructure provider.

The company intends to use a $50 million convertible financing facility to buy "high-performance GPU assets" as part of a pivot into AI computing infrastructure.

The new company cited a "long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider."

Allbirds' statement framed the pivot as the company stepping up to meet a growing gap in the supply of critical AI computing power.

"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 announcement read.

"NewBird AI is being built to help close that gap. The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service."

The sharp pivot comes after Allbirds stock's valuation plunged since going public in 2021. The Allbirds IPO raised roughly $348 million with the stock priced $15 per share.