Footwear maker Allbirds completed its dramatic transformation into an artificial intelligence infrastructure provider on Wednesday, rebranding as Smartbird and sending its stock soaring more than 45%. The company will continue trading under the ticker BIRD. The move caps a strategic overhaul that began in March, when Allbirds sold its brand and shoe assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million. In April, it first signaled an AI pivot, triggering a nearly 600% single-day surge in shares—though the stock later pulled back roughly 68% from that peak.
Alongside the rebrand, Smartbird appointed former Amazon Web Services executive Nadia Carlsten as president, CEO, and board member. Carlsten, who holds a doctorate in engineering, previously led product development at AWS's quantum-computing lab, served as CEO of AI platform DCAI, and worked at Alphabet spinoff SandboxAQ. She succeeds Joe Vernachio, who resigned from his executive role and the board. Lily Yan Hughes became board chair, and Annie Mitchell remains CFO.
“AI is rapidly becoming mission-critical for organizations across every industry. Yet many organizations lack a practical path to deploy and operate the dedicated infrastructure these workloads require,” Carlsten said. Smartbird plans to offer AI infrastructure as a managed service, deploying customized chip clusters for midmarket enterprises that face cost or security hurdles with major cloud providers. The company says it is already in active discussions with potential customers and designing its first cluster deployments.
To fund the buildout, Smartbird expanded its senior secured convertible financing facility from $50 million to $100 million, with proceeds earmarked for graphics processing unit purchases. The company enters a competitive landscape dominated by CoreWeave and Nebius Group, but leadership argues its differentiated strategy and capital position it to capture a slice of the fast-growing AI infrastructure market.
Wednesday’s 39% rally (reflecting the intraday jump reported by some sources) brought the stock up about 25% for the year, though the market cap remains a fraction of its 2021 IPO peak near $4 billion.
