Allbirds has completed one of the stranger pivots in the current AI market: the company that became known for direct-to-consumer shoes is now Smartbird, an AI infrastructure business with capital, a new CEO, and no operating team yet.
The shift gives Smartbird a clear opening and a difficult test. Demand for AI compute is strong, but the company must now prove that its rebrand is more than a stock-market reaction to the biggest technology trend of the moment.
From shoe company to AI infrastructure provider
The change began after Allbirds moved toward AI in April. According to the source article, the company sold its shoe business for $43 million, raised another $100 million from the stock market, and now operates under the Smartbird name.
That sequence left the new company with a plan but not yet the normal shape of an operating business. Nadia Carlsten, a former AWS executive with an engineering PhD, has taken over as CEO after most recently leading the European compute company DCAI.
Carlsten described the immediate work in practical terms: Smartbird needs people and a physical base. She told TechCrunch, “We’re going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and we’re going to be getting an office.” She also said, “The shoe business has officially closed as of yesterday, so that’s all done…The first task that I’m tackling right now is rounding up the leadership team, looking for somebody to lead infrastructure operations, for example.”
That makes Smartbird less like a mature corporate division and more like a startup beginning with unusually large resources. The company has funding, a public-market story, and a CEO with compute experience. What it does not yet have is the full organization needed to deliver the AI infrastructure strategy.
The niche Smartbird wants to serve
Smartbird’s planned business is AI infrastructure. More specifically, Carlsten is aiming at customers that want managed deployments with direct control over the servers running their models.
The source article contrasts this with neoclouds, which focus heavily on the economics of chips, GPU time, and inference tokens. Smartbird’s pitch is different. The target customer is not simply looking for the cheapest or most elastic public cloud option. The target customer wants control of the infrastructure stack.
That need can be tied to political reasons, business-model reasons, or data sovereignty. Carlsten said many companies are still only piloting AI tools, so she could not yet estimate the size of the market. But she pointed to the kinds of organizations she worked with at DCAI, including Novo Nordisk and other European firms with an interest in data sovereignty or bespoke models.
She described potential demand across several areas: “we certainly have anybody that’s within the pharmaceutical industry, energy industry, financial, the public sector,” she said.
The common thread is not just interest in AI. It is the desire to run AI systems under tighter control than a standard public cloud arrangement may provide.
What Smartbird is and is not trying to compete with
Carlsten’s view is that Smartbird is not primarily going after hyperscalers or neoclouds. Instead, she sees the competition as internal company projects: organizations that might otherwise build and operate their own controlled AI infrastructure.
That does not mean Smartbird is alone. The source article notes that Hewlett Packard offers a single-tenant managed AI compute service, and Equinix does as well. So the market is real, but it is also already occupied by established infrastructure companies.
Smartbird also may not compete mainly on price. Cloud providers work hard to keep chip usage optimized 24 hours a day so they can offer lower-cost compute. Carlsten’s argument is more focused on specialized workflows. Companies with those workflows may be able to operate more efficiently on servers they control directly.
The scale of Smartbird’s expected deployments also appears different from the largest AI infrastructure announcements. Carlsten said she expects compute clusters to be deployed for several customers by the end of the year. She also said potential customer needs are in the range of hundreds to thousands of chips.
That is why she does not believe Smartbird needs major chip commitments to begin. As she put it, the opportunity is “not about large scales and huge numbers of GPUs, they’re more about agility of these clusters, and more about having control of the infrastructure stack.”
The pressure behind the pivot
AI infrastructure has become a powerful market force. The source article points to its effect on stock prices for chipmakers, cloud providers, and energy companies, and even to investor interest in orbital data centers as an idea.
Against that backdrop, Smartbird’s pivot can look like a familiar public-market move: take a struggling company, attach it to a hot trend, and benefit as investors respond. The source article explicitly compares the move to a meme stock playbook associated with Gamestop.
Carlsten argues that this is not what happened. “It wasn’t, ‘Let’s just do AI, because it’s AI, and it’s hot,’” she said. She said the question was whether the company had “a chance to build a business over time that is going to find this niche in the market and be able to grow over time?”
Her compensation also signals the importance of the role. The source article says Carlsten will receive a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to take the job.
A new strategy with an old identity left behind
The pivot also changes more than the product category. When Allbirds moved away from shoes, its public benefit corporation status was dropped as well. That status had been tied to the sustainability commitments that were part of the shoe company’s pitch.
The source article notes that PBC charters are often used by companies to emphasize non-financial commitments, and gives OpenAI as an example of a PBC focused on AI safety. In Smartbird’s case, the change suggests that such structures are not permanent protection against a major strategic turn.
The central question now is execution. Smartbird has capital, a CEO, and a defined market thesis around controlled AI infrastructure and data sovereignty. But it must still hire the team, secure customers, deploy clusters, and show that its niche can support the business Carlsten has been brought in to build.
Carlsten said Smartbird’s board has made a long-term commitment to her AI strategy. She also framed the broader test directly: “There are some companies out there chasing AI,” she told TechCrunch, “ but at the end of the day, what matters is, is there actual weight behind the chasing?”