After selling its footwear business and rebranding, Allbirds is officially shifting its focus to AI. The new company is called Smartbird, and newly appointed CEO Nadia Carlsten stated that the most pressing tasks are building a management team, hiring employees, and setting up offices for the new business.
Carlsten, who previously worked at AWS and most recently led the European computing company DCAI, told TechCrunch that the existing footwear business had been officially handed over the previous day, and the company would now build its AI business team from scratch, including finding key positions such as an infrastructure operations manager.
From footwear brands to computing power services
Allbirds previously announced a transformation in April, subsequently selling its footwear business for $43 million, raising $100 million from the capital market, and renaming the company Smartbird. The report suggests this shift aligns with the capital market's high focus on AI infrastructure and has boosted the company's stock performance.
Smartbird positions itself not as a general cloud service provider, but as an AI infrastructure provider. Carlsten said the company aims to serve customers who need direct control over servers and value data sovereignty. These customers typically do not want to rely entirely on the public cloud for political, compliance, or business model reasons.
Targeting companies that value data sovereignty
Carlsten believes the target customers are closer to companies building their own AI projects, rather than large-scale cloud computing buyers seeking the lowest prices. She mentions that the pharmaceutical, energy, financial, and public sectors may all have this need, especially in scenarios using custom models and with strict requirements on data storage locations.
She also acknowledged that the market is still in its early stages, with many companies still in the AI tool pilot phase, making it difficult to accurately estimate the market size at present. According to her plan, Smartbird hopes to deploy computing clusters for several clients by the end of this year.
- The target demand is in the hundreds to thousands of chips.
- The focus is not on ultra-large-scale GPU clusters
- Greater emphasis is placed on deployment flexibility and control over infrastructure.
Instead of engaging in price wars, we'll focus on customized deployments.
Carlsten stated that Smartbird will not compete with large cloud service providers on price. She believes that public cloud platforms typically rely on optimizing chip utilization around the clock to keep costs down, while some enterprises with specific workflows may be more efficient using their own or dedicated servers.
The report notes that this is not a blank market. HP and data center operator Equinix both offer single-tenant, managed AI computing power services. Compared to some computing power startups that are expanding aggressively, Smartbird's approach leans more towards customized deployments rather than locking in large-scale chip orders one-time.
Carlsten also stated that the company's shift was not simply about chasing the AI trend, but rather about building a long-term business around a niche market. According to reports, her annual salary is $700,000, and she receives approximately $9 million in stock awards.
Existing sustainability commitments fade with the transition
With the sale of its business, Allbirds also relinquished its former non-profit corporation status. This status was originally intended to reinforce the company's commitment to sustainability. The report points out that such bylaws are often used to emphasize commitments beyond financial objectives, but they don't necessarily provide long-term accountability when a company's strategy shifts dramatically.
Carlsten stated that the Smartbird board has made a long-term commitment to her proposed AI strategy, and the key now lies in whether this vision can be truly translated into an operational business.
