Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy

The shoe company Allbirds, famous for its wool trainers, is pivoting to AI. You read that right. The San Francisco company has plans "to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider." It's also changing 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 unnamed investor to assist with this enterprise. This money will be used for the "acquisition and monetization of graphics processing units, related high-performance computing infrastructure capable to support high workloads and other related assets." In other words, all of the things one would need to start an AI compute company.

Allbirds has always been known as an eco-friendly shoe company and, well, there's no real way to do AI while ...