Allbirds stock fell on Friday after the company said it is turning away from sustainable sneakers and into an artificial intelligence business, capping a week of wild trading that sent the shares up nearly 600% on Wednesday, down 35% on Thursday and then another 1% lower by the close. The week ended with a 350% gain, but the move left a company once known for shoes now betting its future on AI compute hardware and long-term leasing.
The market value behind that swing was just as dramatic. Allbirds, which had a market cap of $21.7 million at Tuesday's close, peaked at $159 million on Wednesday before slipping to $94 million by the end of Friday. The company plans to change its name to NewBird AI and raise $50 million, with the funds expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.
Allbirds launched 10 years ago and went public in 2021, building a brand around its Wool Runner shoe before investors lost patience as customers gravitated toward Hoka and On. In late March, the company sold its footwear assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million, a deal with a company best known for Aerosoles and Ed Hardy, clearing the way for the pivot announced this week.
NewBird AI says it will seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, arguing that spot markets and hyperscalers cannot reliably meet customer demand. The company said the rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute, while GPU procurement lead times are rising, North American data center vacancy rates have hit historic lows and compute capacity coming online through mid-2026 is already fully committed. It added that enterprises, AI developers and research organizations are unable to secure the resources they need to build, train and run AI at scale.
That shift lands in a market where the valuations of Nvidia, Meta, Google and SanDisk have surged over the past year, and it invites a comparison that hangs over any sudden corporate reinvention: Long Island Iced Tea's 2017 rebrand as Long Blockchain Corp., followed by Nasdaq's delisting of the company in 2018. The difference here is that Allbirds has already sold its shoes business, and the stock reaction suggests investors are willing, at least for now, to treat the pivot as more than a headline.