Shoe company turns to AI, a sign of a completely normal and healthy economy

Shoe company Allbirds, famous for its wool sneakers, is move to AI. You read that right. The San Francisco company plans to “pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a provider of fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI cloud solutions.” It also changes its name to NewBird AI.

This is subject to shareholder approval, with a vote scheduled for May 18. Once approved, the company will raise $50 million from an anonymous investor to help with this endeavor. This money will be used for “the acquisition and monetization of graphics processing units, associated high-performance computing infrastructure capable of supporting high workloads, and other related assets.” In other words, everything one would need to start an AI computing business.

Allbirds has always been known as a eco-friendly shoe company well, there’s not really a way to do it AI while protecting the environment. The company plans to shed all eco-friendly branding, with shareholders asked to approve a proposed charter amendment to “remove references to the company operating in the public interest of environmental conservation.”

Investors love AI, despite growing public sentiment against technology. To that end, the announcement that Allbirds was moving from shoes, a product category in which it has a decade of experience, to AI computing, a product category in which it has no experience, sent the stock soaring more than 400%. Financial Times suggested this increase will be short-lived and that retail investors should stay away.

This shift toward cloud AI computing is surprising and, frankly, bizarre, but something radical was bound to happen to Allbirds at some point. The shoe company was once in great shape, with a valuation of around $4 billion as recently as 2021. It sold its shoe business and brand to an investment firm. earlier this month for just $39 million.

Allbirds is not the only company moving toward computing in an effort to feed the hungry goblin called AI. Boom Supersonic is a startup trying to build the world’s fastest airliner, but has started sell gas turbines to AI companies to power data centers. Many Bitcoin mining centers have migrated to AI and it’s worth remembering that NVIDIA’s GPUs were once primarily used for PC gaming.

This article was originally published on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/shoe-company-pivots-to-ai-compute-in-sign-of-a-totally-normal-and-healthy-economy-161449196.html?src=rss