In November, Allbirds informed shareholders that it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Turning the shoe company into an AI computing company is the company’s final plan.
It’s not easy.
AI industry insiders say Allbirds, which plans to change its name to NewBird AI, currently lacks the capital, physical assets, expertise and relationships needed to compete in an increasingly crowded field.
Here’s what companies must do to reinvent themselves.
let’s collect more money
Allbirds announced last month that it had sold its shoe business and its underlying intellectual property for $39 million. The company announced Wednesday that it has raised $50 million in convertible notes that can be used to purchase graphics processing units used to train and deploy AI language models.
Still, Allbirds’ war chest of about $90 million is still small change in an industry that is raising tens of billions of dollars to build data centers and buy the chips needed to run large language models. Additionally, the company did not own any warehouse or real estate assets at the end of 2025, according to its filings. Allbirds did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
CoreWeave, the leader of a group of companies known as neoclouds that Allbirds is believed to be seeking to join, plans to spend $30 billion to $35 billion this year building its capabilities.
“To run an institutional-grade computing cluster, it could be at least hundreds or hundreds of millions,” Warren Hosseinion, head of capital markets at GPU investment firm Compute Labs, told Business Insider.
find customers
One of your first tasks will be signing deals with Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and more. Allbirds can use these deals to secure additional funding to purchase more GPUs.
Although CoreWeave is pioneering such a model, Allbirds may have a hard time convincing potential partners as well as potential investors that Allbirds is in the game long-term, AI industry executives said.
“If we can pass the underwriting review…that will be the biggest hurdle,” Hosseinion said.
consider acquisition
Darren Kimura, CEO of AI Squared, which helps companies adopt artificial intelligence tools, said one way Allbirds could move faster would be to acquire a private company already doing this work.
The combined company will be listed and have access to public market capital.
Allbirds’ $50 million in funding should be enough to hire a management team and some chips and launch what is essentially a proof of concept, Kimura said.
“You can buy enough to get started, use it as an example to demonstrate that the model works, and then build on it.”
Hire leaders with AI experience
Paul Calatayou, founder of AI data center developer VoltScape, said AI infrastructure companies need executives with political and energy expertise, and said he has projects worth more than billions of dollars in development.
“Somewhere in between there has to be a group that knows how to run a data center,” he says.
Allbirds CEO Joe Bernacchio, who succeeded founder Joey Zwillinger in 2024, comes from the clothing retail industry. He led the turnaround of Mountain Hardware and has also held executive positions at The North Face and Spider Active Sports, according to his LinkedIn profile.
CFO Annie Mitchell previously worked at Gymshark and Adidas before joining Allbirds, according to a press release announcing her hire.
Both executives will receive retention bonuses if they remain with the company until the sale of its footwear business is completed, expected in the second quarter. It’s unclear how long they will remain there after that.