• by Tanya Gazdik , April 16, 2026

The company once known for trendy woolen sneakers is planning to buy powerful computer chips and rebrand itself NewBird AI — yes AI.

The San Francisco-based company, once valued at $4.2 billion, signed a definitive agreement to sell its intellectual property and assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million last month, noted Marketing Daily.

The company said “an unnamed investor had agreed to spend $50 million to finance a shift to A.I. infrastructure,” according to The New York Times. 

That money will be used to buy graphics processing units, known as GPUs, powerful chips that can run calculations and analyze enormous amounts of data.

“Shares of Allbirds, the 2010s pioneer of trendy sneakers and eco-conscious millennial marketing, took flight in an almost comical fashion Wednesday morning,” according to CNN. 

The stock, which had been in the gutter since its November 2021, shot up more than 700% Wednesday. But it quickly crashed on Thursday as reality began to set in.

The rally subsequently came to a “screeching halt,” as Bloomberg put it, with shares sinking a dismal 35% on Thursday.

“In other words, possibly ketamine-crazed Wall Street bros realized the morning after that a struggling shoe company may not be able to prop up a trillion-dollar industry with its promises of buying up impossible-to-get AI chips,” according to Futurism. “The bizarre stock market performance perfectly highlighted persistent concerns over an AI bubble, with business fundamentals taking a backseat as investors bet big on a bright and profitable future that may — or may not — still be years away.”

Slate calls the pivot “yet another symptom of an especially grim trend in modern-day corporate America.”

The drastic change of direction has some industry watchers scratching their heads, notes The Associated Press. 

“On the surface, it’s a strange pivot,” AI infrastructure expert Bill Kleyman tells the AP. “I’ve been in this industry a while, and a company like Allbirds moving from shoes into AI infrastructure is not a very natural adjacency.”

The business of running physical AI infrastructure “requires access to GPUs in a constrained market, long-term power agreements, advanced cooling strategies, and a credible operating model,” said Kleyman, CEO and co-founder of Apolo.

"There’s an obvious reason for companies to jump on the AI train—the technology is creating enormous wealth," notes The Atlantic, which wins for best illustration of the pivot. "The S&P 500 hit a record high yesterday, thanks in part to the strength of the American tech sector. And that doesn’t even account for the two leading AI companies, both of which are private. OpenAI and Anthropic are valued at about $1.2 trillion combined—more than the GDP of Poland. When those companies go public, as they’re expected to in the not-too-distrant future, they will generate astounding wealth for their executives and investors."