Shoe company pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy

Allbirds has always been known as an and, well, there’s no real way to do . The company plans on getting rid of any eco-friendly branding, with stockholders being asked to approve a charter amendment proposal to “remove references to the company being operated for the environmental conservation public benefit.”

Investors absolutely love AI, despite . To that end, the announcement that Allbirds was transitioning from shoes, a product category it has a decade of experience in, to AI compute, a product category it has no experience in, shot the stock up by over 400 percent. Financial Times has suggested this uptick and that retail investors should stay away.

This pivot to AI cloud compute is surprising and, frankly, bizarre, but something drastic was bound to happen to Allbirds at some point. The shoe company was once riding high, with a valuation of around $4 billion as recently as 2021. It sold its shoe business and branding to an investment firm .

Allbirds isn’t the only company pivoting to compute in an effort to feed the . Boom Supersonic is a startup trying to build the world’s fastest airliner but has begun to power data centers. Many Bitcoin mining centers and it’s worth remembering that NVIDIA’s GPUs were once used primarily for PC gaming.