Footwear company Allbirds on Wednesday revealed a surprising shift in focus, using a financing instrument often used by startups to enter the AI infrastructure race.
The company, which has struggled in recent years after its peak popularity from 2018 to 2022, said the convertible financing facility will be used to purchase “high-performance GPU assets,” which will then be made available to customers looking for AI compute capacity.
The long-term plan for Allbirds is to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-service and AI-native cloud services provider.
As part of the rebranding, Allbirds sold its brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group and said it anticipates changing its name to NewBird AI.
“The rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet,” Allbirds said in the statement. “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.”
“NewBird AI is being built to help close that gap,” the company added.
Conversion of the facility is expected in the second quarter, although it is still subject to stockholder approval at an upcoming meeting in May.
Allbirds’ new venture comes at a time when spending on AI infrastructure and data centers has reached a new high.
Tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta have collectively committed tens of billions of dollars to build AI-ready data centers, with capex increasingly tied to GPUs and custom AI chips.
Earlier this month, Intel said it will be joining Elon Musk’s Texas-based Terafab project, with the company set to develop chips for Musk’s companies SpaceX, xAI and Tesla.
Before that, in September of last year, Nvidia said it would invest $5 billion to help Intel develop custom data center and PC products.
