Allbirds pivots from shoes to AI, renaming as NewBird AI with $50M funding for AI cloud services.

Allbirds, known for its merino wool shoes, is shifting its business focus to artificial intelligence and will rename itself NewBird AI. The company secured $50 million to develop AI compute infrastructure and aims to become a GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider. Its shoe business was sold to American Exchange Group, which will continue that legacy. This pivot addresses the growing demand for AI compute resources amid low data center vacancy rates and aims to offer long-term leased AI hardware to enterprises and developers.