Allbirds Ditched Shoes for AI Infrastructure. Seriously.
Smartbird CEO Nadia Carlsten discusses the former shoe company's pivot to AI infrastructure and compute clusters.
Remember Allbirds? The cozy wool sneaker darling? It's now an AI infrastructure company. Yes, really.
In an interview with TechCrunch's Tim Fernholz, Smartbird CEO Nadia Carlsten laid out the company's transformation from direct-to-consumer footwear brand to compute provider. The plan includes deploying compute clusters — a move that sounds like a plot ripped straight from HBO's "Silicon Valley."
Allbirds kicked off its pivot to AI back in April, a move that raised plenty of eyebrows across the tech world. Under the Smartbird banner, the company is now positioning itself squarely in the AI infrastructure space.
Details on the scale and timeline of the compute deployments remain thin. But the sheer audacity of a shoe company going full data center is hard to ignore. The pivot is real. The sneakers are not coming back.