What Allbirds needs to do to make its Hail Mary AI pivot succeed

• Allbirds’ plan to trade shoe stores for data centers won’t be easy to pull off.
• The company needs more money, expertise, and relationships with hyperscalers.
• It could also try to acquire a private company already doing this work.

In November, Allbirds told shareholders it was on the brink of insolvency. Transforming the shoe company into an AI compute company is its last-ditch plan.

It won’t be easy.

Allbirds, which intends to change its name to NewBird AI, currently lacks the money, the physical assets, the expertise, and the relationships it will need to compete in an increasingly crowded space, AI industry insiders say.

Here’s what the company would have to do to reinvent itself.

Raise more money

Allbirds last month said it had sold its shoe business and the underlying intellectual property for $39 million. The company Wednesday said it had raised $50 million in a convertible note that it could use to purchase graphics processing units used to train and deploy AI language models.

Even so, Allbirds’ war chest, some $90 million or so, is still small change in an industry that’s raising tens of billions of dollars to build the data centers and buy the chips needed to run large language models. And the company owned no warehouses or real-estate assets as of the end of 2025, according to company filings. Allbirds didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.

CoreWeave, the leader of a class of firms known as neoclouds that Allbirds appears aimed at joining, plans to spend $30 to $35 billion this year building its capacity.

“To run institutional grade compute clusters it can be in the order of a couple hundred, a few hundred million, at least,” Warren Hosseinion, the head of capital markets at GPU investor Compute Labs, told Business Insider.

Find customers

One of the first tasks will be signing contracts with the likes of Amazon, Google, Meta or Microsoft. Allbirds could then use those contracts to secure the additional financing to buy more GPUs.

Though CoreWeave has pioneered such a model, Allbirds may struggle to persuade potential partners as well as potential investors that it’s in the game for the long haul, AI industry executives said.

“If you can pass the underwriting diligence…that will be their biggest hurdle,” Hosseinion said.

Consider an acquisition

One way for Allbirds to move faster would be to acquire a private company already doing this work, said Darren Kimura, CEO of AI Squared, which helps companies deploy artificial intelligence tools.

The merged company would then be publicly traded and have access to public markets capital.

Allbirds’ $50 million in financing should be enough to hire a management team, some chips, and begin what would essentially be a proof of concept, Kimura said.

“You could buy enough to get going, and use that as an example to demonstrate the model working, and then build it out.”

Hire leaders with AI experience

AI infrastructure companies need management with expertise in politics and energy, said Paul Calatayud, the founder of AI data center developer VoltScape, who said he has several billion-dollar-plus projects under development.

“Somewhere in between there has to be a group that knows how to handle running a data center,” he said.

Allbirds Chief Executive Joe Vernachio, who succeeded founder Joey Zwillinger in 2024, comes from the retail clothing industry. He led a turnaround at Mountain Hardwear, and also held executive roles at The North Face and Spyder Active Sports, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Annie Mitchell, the CFO, worked at Gymshark and Adidas before joining Allbirds, according to a press release announcing her hire.

Both executives will receive retention bonuses if they stay at the company through the closing of the sale of the shoes business, expected sometime in the second quarter. It’s unclear how much longer after that they will stick around.