By Nate Wolf

Goodbye, Allbirds. Hello, Smartbird.

The one-time shoe company announced Wednesday that it had sold off the Allbirds brand, adopted a new name, and appointed a tech veteran as CEO. The move completes Allbirds' unusual pivot from a struggling footwear retailer to a surprise artificial-intelligence play.

Smartbird stock -- still trading under the ticker BIRD -- soared 47% on Wednesday.

In March, the company agreed to sell Allbirds to American Exchange for $39 million. It followed that deal the next month by announcing plans to transition into an AI data-center operator. Shares soared nearly 600% that day, though they have since fallen some 65%.

New CEO Nadia Carlsten will be in charge of actually delivering the AI infrastructure. Carlsten, who holds a doctorate in engineering, previously served as CEO of AI platform DCAI and led product development for Amazon Web Services' quantum-computing lab.

"AI is rapidly becoming mission-critical for organizations across every industry," Carlsten said in a statement. "Yet many organizations lack a practical path to deploy and operate the dedicated infrastructure these workloads require."

Carlsten is correct on this point. Enterprises are using all the AI capacity they can get -- in some cases, even too much. But Smartbird faces an uphill battle in convincing Wall Street its sudden AI pivot is anything more than a gimmick to save the stock.

Best known for selling wool shoes to the well-heeled, if not particularly fashionable, tech class of Silicon Valley, the company's market capitalization plummeted from $4 billion just after its 2021 initial public offering to $35 million as of Tuesday's close.

Smartbird is now competing with AI infrastructure providers worth tens of billions of dollars, such as CoreWeave and Nebius Group, in an extremely capital-intensive market.

The company says it will keep costs down by building chip clusters to customers' specifications rather than constructing large-scale infrastructure ahead of demand. It will also target midmarket clients that have trouble accessing cloud compute because of costs or security issues.

Smartbird is in active talks with potential customers, it said.

The company also has some debt financing to back its AI buildout, boosting the size of a previously announced convertible bond facility to $100 million from $50 million.

Make no mistake, Smartbird's transformation is still a Hail Mary. Then again, it is probably better to be an AI moonshot than a failing shoe company in 2026. At least that is what the market is saying.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com

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June 17, 2026 13:27 ET (17:27 GMT)

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