Allbirds announced a switch from shoes to AI and its stock jumped 600 percent

4 hours ago 2

Richard Lawler

is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.

Allbirds had a hit a decade ago with its Wool Runner shoes, but after a $4 billion IPO in 2021, the business never turned a profit, and sales dropped nearly 50 percent between 2022 and 2025. The company recently announced it would sell off its name and assets for $39 million to American Exchange after closing the remaining stores. That shell listing, however, still has some use as the Financial Times points out, and now CEO Joe Vernachio has announced a plan to raise $50 million from an unnamed investor, which will turn NewBird AI into “a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.”

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. 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.

The rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet. Global enterprise spending on AI services and data center investment are on the rise. At the same time, GPU procurement lead times are increasing for high-end hardware, North American data center vacancy rates have reached historic lows, and market-wide compute capacity coming online through mid-2026 is already fully committed. The result is a market where enterprises, AI developers, and research organizations are unable to secure the compute resources they need to build, train and run AI at scale.

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.

What does that have to do with anything Allbirds has ever done, and how much AI compute can $50 million provide to its customers that trillion- and billion-dollar competitors can’t? I don’t know, but this looks a lot like the kind of zombie brand pivot we saw in the SPAC-happy days of 2021, when Radio Shack suddenly turned into a cryptocurrency company.

Chardan Capital is listed in its press release as a placement agent, and in another recent deal, it served as the “exclusive M&A” adviser on a merger between the maker of the Evie smart ring, Movano, and an AI cloud computing company, Corvex. The newly combined company is still publicly listed under the “MOVE” ticker, but there’s no mention of health tech or future smart rings in its press release.

Following the NewBird AI news, the price of its stock (BIRD) spiked as high as $24.31, a 721 percent increase after opening the day at $6.82, and continues to hover at around $20 or so as of this writing.