Shares of New Zealand-founded, US-based shoe brand Allbirds soared 580 per cent after the company’s leadership sold off their shoemaking business and announced they had secured $69 million ($US50 million) in finance to become an AI infrastructure provider.
The surprising pivot comes weeks after the company, whose signature Merino wool sneakers led it to a $5.6 billion ($US4 billion) valuation after its 2021 IPO, sold its assets for just $54 million ($US39 million) to American Exchange Group (AEG).
The rest of the company, it announced last week, will be renamed NewBird AI and become a “fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider” – with investors given a special dividend.
Those who stay “will be invested in a growing AI compute infrastructure business supported by the [finance],” Allbirds said, laying out plans to service “a market where enterprises, AI developers, and research organisations are unable to secure the compute resources they need to build, train and run AI at scale.”
News of the pivot sent investors into a flurry, with shares surging from around $US2.50 per share to $US16.99, before falling around 35 per cent to settle at $US11 per share – still a fraction of the more than $US500 per share it commanded after its IPO.
AI everything, everywhere, all at once
Will Allbirds’s AI pivot be enough to save a company whose revenues dropped by 19.7 per cent from 2024 to 2025, fuelling sentiment that it had entered a financial death spiral because it couldn’t turn good reviews and social media buzz into financial success?
A shareholder vote next month will serve as a referendum on the strategy, with the sale to AEG still to be approved amidst cynicism from analysts who see the move as proof the AI craze has become a repeat of the blockchain rush a decade ago.
Allbirds was founded by Joey Zwillinger (left) and New Zealander Tim Brown (right). Image: Allbirds
The share price of iced tea maker Long Island Iced Tea Corp, for one, climbed 183 per cent in 2017 after the beverage maker renamed itself Long Blockchain Corp.
The company was subpoenaed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) months later, pushed off the Nasdaq in April 2018, and delisted in 2021 after failing to provide financial statements for several years.
Such poorly planned business shifts have tainted the well for spiritual successors like Allbirds which, no matter how well intentioned, face growing scepticism from investors that are both flocking to AI-related businesses and fleeing them.
Investment advisor Fidelity International, for one, warns that despite “significant increases” in AI related stocks, those stocks “may be overvalued and could be part of a speculative bubble, similar to past market phenomena like the dotcom boom.”
Too little, too late?
Backdoor listings – where new tech companies are acquired by established and listed companies that pivot towards the new technology – surged during the dot-com boom, when listed Australian prospectors leased their stock tickers to capital-rich startups.
That didn’t always go so well, but the demand for AI infrastructure is real – with five Australian fund managers recently choosing AI as this year’s top investment theme.
Yarra Capital Management head of Australian equities research Katie Hudson noted the “indiscriminate selling of technology and other growth stocks,” noting that “any companies that sell AI-related products and services, or have some adjacency to AI, have been caught in the broad-based sell-off.”
“Share price weakness is one development being watched in 2026, particularly where valuations have moved sharply,” she said.
In the absence of more specific plans, becoming an AI firm could be an uphill battle for Allbirds – a company that GlobalData Retail analyst Neil Saunders recently said was “built on an obsession with sustainability, rather than an obsession with what customers actually wanted.”
The sale to AEG is an “inauspicious end” to the shoe brand but “the most sensible way forward” given its “perpetual spiral of revenue decline,” Saunders wrote before the AI rebranding was announced – but afterwards, he was as confused as many others.
Calling it “one of the weirdest updates of perhaps all time,” Saunders called the move “a very odd pivot… Something has been reborn from the flames [but] quite what it is remains to be seen.”
