Struggling Shoe Retailer Allbirds Pivots To AI, Stock Explodes More Than 700%
- Reference: 0181719732
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/04/15/1646259/struggling-shoe-retailer-allbirds-pivots-to-ai-stock-explodes-more-than-700
- Source link:
> The move boosted shares of the miniscule market cap company -- it was valued at about $21 million at Tuesday's close -- by more than 700%. The shares, which were under $3 a day ago, jumped to above $17. [...] The new company, which expects to be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. Allbirds announced a deal with American Exchange Group to sell its intellectual property and other assets for $39 million last month.
"The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service," the company said in the announcement.
[1] https://ir.allbirds.com/news-releases/news-release-details/allbirds-inc-executes-50m-convertible-financing-facility
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html
Just beyond wtf... (Score:5, Informative)
A company that has zero demonstrated technological assets, whose only logistics experience pertains to shoes...
And they vaguely purport to be able to secure compute hardware better than all the existing players out there, despite everyone knowing exactly where the bottlenecks are and who is clogging them up...
What idiots invested in this concept? How many millions can I get if I just randomly declare I'm going to get more and better GPUs than all the well known AI players?
Re: (Score:3)
Well, what are you waiting for? Step on it!
(The idiots may also have been algorithms.)
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> How many millions can I get if I just randomly declare I'm going to get more and better GPUs than all the well known AI players?
Depends on your ability to communicate your plans to investors with deep pockets.
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Ok, guess I'll give it a shot:
AI AI AI AI AI AI. Give me funding.
That should do it.
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I think you might want to try that same post on LinkedIn rather than Slashdot. Pretty sure the readership here trends a little less yacht with boat shoes and a little more ponytail, greybeard, and socks with sandals.
Irrational Exuberance (Score:2)
It's 1996 all over again... ___blank___ but on the internet, err, but video, err, in the metaverse, crap crap crap, uh, on the block chain, err, we mean AI, this time for real. That's it. It's AI. We're artificially intelligent now.
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I mean, a small online bookstore pivoted to become one of the most foundational structural elements of the internet.
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...and an electric car company owns Twitter.
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And thousands of other comparable pivots went nowhere.
At least with amazon, you could connect the dots, ok, we are investing in an online bookstore, ok, now they are selling more stuff, but it's still selling online stuff... Many years later they start being seen as a compute vendor, but only after they had shown in-house prowess for years prior.
This is just coming out of nowhere with no continuity purporting to mysteriously outmaneuver every existing player despite the big issues in their way being well k
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The advantage of that bookstore is it didn't shutdown its online store, it added cloud services as a secondary line of business, while the primary one kept operating and made money. And still, for normal companies, a second LoB that's so distinct from the first is a leap, but Amazon made it work.
Here we have a full scam operating. You can go from "I'm operating a convenience store" to "I'm now going to build AI data centers and shutdown my store", but no one is going to give you money for that unless some
Re: (Score:2)
> What idiots invested in this concept?
I could envision a scheme in which the buyers are the sellers with fake identities, as part of a money laundering scheme.
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> A company that has zero demonstrated technological assets, whose only logistics experience pertains to shoes...
> And they vaguely purport to be able to secure compute hardware better than all the existing players out there, despite everyone knowing exactly where the bottlenecks are and who is clogging them up...
> What idiots invested in this concept? How many millions can I get if I just randomly declare I'm going to get more and better GPUs than all the well known AI players?
They're following the same thing wh
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Okay, count me in. What do we call the company? Scalable Cloud AI Management?
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"The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware"
"initially seek" - why not "will acquire?" Anyone dumb enough to read this kind of drivel and think "take money please" is well, probably a good portion of algorithmic traders out there.
High performance AND low latency?? You can't have it all!
Wait a minute, this whole press release is AI-generated, as is the article. Is Allbirds even real? I see a new "shoe company" every day in ads. I figured it was one of those e
Re: (Score:2)
> Is Allbirds even real?
Everybody knows all [1]birds aren't real [birdsarentreal.com]. :-D
[1] https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/faq
frothy (Score:5, Insightful)
this is the kind of thing that echoes of 1999 and 2007 bubbles.
(and the S&L crisis I guess.... and the Japanese forex thing ... and Chinese real estate)
but hell is I know the difference between irrational exuberance and hitting when the iron is hot.
(that was a good phrase [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_exuberance
Re: (Score:2)
Greenspan made his "irrational exuberance" comment in 1996, about the dot-com bubble. That bubble didn't really finish bursting until late 2002, six years later.
Yeeeeeeeee-hawww!
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This is far worse than those bubbles because this time even Wallstreet themselves realise this is nothing but a bubble and is directly offering investors way to hedge against it. Goldman Sachs introduced the S&P 500 ex-AI index (ticker: SPXXAI).
Dot-Cum-bubble (Score:2)
Dot-Com Bubble: "We'll move X to the Internet and do X on the web! Invest!"
AI Bubble: "We'll move X to a data warehouse and do X via AI! Invest!"
[1]ShoeGPT [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_phone
mr pumpndumpsecopolis (Score:1)
Pumped.... and dumped!
Re: (Score:1)
> Pumped.... and dumped!
Like your mom.
Dumb Money Chasing Dumb Money (Score:3)
I can see deciding to sell your business because you see not enough profit in the future.
I can also see deciding to invest in AI.
But I can not see investing in someone else's attempt to invest in AI Just do it yourself.
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If you don't know how to invest in AI, just ask a Chatbot for advice.
How will Right Wing Grifters spin this??? (Score:2)
So will Allbirds be the laughing stock of the Right Wing Media bubble....as they undoubtedly will be for the mainstream sectors and late night comics....or will the grifter wing of the Right Wing media movement push this as a story of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, like they did when Long Island Tea Corp because Long Blockchain...mostly because everyone with common sense thought this was an April Fool's article.
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So the failing New Zealand founded eco-friendly climate protecting shoe company pivoting to AI only looks bad because it is a right wing media conspiracy? I am not sure you have thought about this or much else in your reply.
This is evidence that AI has a giant bubble and a failing shoe store seeing it's stock go up %700 is evidence of the insanity around AI. This is not about politics this is economics and it should be sobering to those propping this bubble up.
They have nothing to do with the Right Wing (Score:2)
But the Right Wing Media/Podcast circuit reports on the news, just like anyone else...this is definitely newsworthy and will be one of those commonly told stories 30 years from now....like the lady at McDonald's who sued them because they serve hot coffee and she spilled in her lap (which yeah, there are details conveniently left out of that story, but you've heard it dozens of times by now).
You're correct about the AI mania. I just am curious to see if the response is universal ridicule...or will the gri
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Trying to portray this in a lens of partisan media serves as misdirection from the actual point. No media is looking at this and showing it as a healthy signifier of anything. This should be a humorous but sobering wakeup call on all fronts.
A fool and their money.... (Score:2)
Hey, I've got this super duper 486 computer here - I'm going to run AI on it. Invest $28 billion into me!
This bubble needs to burst already and end this insanity.
Did somone (Score:4, Funny)
get April Fools' Day and Tax Day confused?
Quality (Score:2, Informative)
My wife loves Allbirds shoes. She has knee issues and they are the most comfortable walking shoes she has found. AEG is the holding company where brands go to die. Time to stock up before they start churning out expensive garbage.
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> My wife
There it is. No deeper well of faddish nonsense than American women. You can design a slipper, have disposable Vietnamese labor make them for $0.50 a pair while mouthing ESG stuff, and American women will put you on NASDAQ.
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Yup, been buying up spares for a year or so now, I started thinking something was up when they had major stock issues, and theyve never really recovered from that so. I have maybe 10 pairs of my favourites tucked away now.
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I have never even heard of or noticed "allbirds" shoes. Ever. And I was just looking for shoes on Amazon. I just searched for "Sustainable shoes" on Amazon and not a single Allbirds result came up. I bought 2 pairs of Altra shoes thinking "this is not a real shoe company" but I guess what the world needs is more shoe brands. There seem to be infinite shoe branding possibilities, yet all our shoes look very similar..
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> AEG is the holding company where brands go to die.
IMO, that's redundant. Holding companies are where brands go to die. Nothing specific to AEG. :-)
Remember Pets.com (Score:2)
Because this is feeling very pets.com
Nice ideological commitment there! (Score:2)
My, that's quite the moral and philosophical turnaround. Switching from shoes made with a focus on sustainability, to server farms which rape and pillage the environment in multiple ways and on a truly dramatic scale?
The shift is impressive - but not in a good way...
Long Island Blockchain (Score:2)
Long Island Blockchain 2: Natural Stupidity
A SPAC of a diffeent name? (Score:2)
From the outside this looks a lot like a SPAC. Exchange-listed company acquires something else to get it listed?
Allbirds was essentially a shell corporation, so why not?
Pump and Dump (Score:2)
1. make announcement about pivot to AI infrastructure
2. stock goes up
3. SELL!!
That IT department (Score:2)
Imagine you're working in IT there and the ticket comes in to get a quote on converting the entire company from shoes to AI compute hosting. I hope they didn't send it on April 1st.
Waiting (Score:3)
Iâ(TM)m just waiting for the other shoe to dropâ¦
Every old thing becomes new again (Score:2)
Anyone remember, back in 2017, when the Long Island Iced Tea company [1]suddenly pivoted to blockchain? [cnbc.com]
There was a similar effect on their share price, followed by subsequent investigations, [2]prosecutions for insider trading [cnn.com], and finally a realisation by the markets that perhaps blockchain wasn't the world-changer they thought it would be.
With any luck this will be the first prick in the "AI" bubble, as if there weren't enough pricks involved already.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-cap-adds-blockchain-to-name-and-stock-soars.html
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/10/investing/blockchain-long-island-insider-trading
Have they seen the price of RAM? (Score:2)
That "raise up to $50 million in funding" isn't going to buy much...
KTEL is back (Score:1)
For those who were trading stocks during the dot com bubble, you know what I'm talking about.
Another bubble, remember tea company blockchain? (Score:2)
This is definitely a sign of the current bubble (LLMs).
And some of us do remember ...
For example when a [1]tea company added blockchain to its name [cnbc.com] and its stock soared 200%?
Later, it [2]was investigated and charged by the SEC [wikipedia.org].
Just like Pets.com in the dotcom era.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-cap-adds-blockchain-to-name-and-stock-soars.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
The same thing was done (Score:2)
with blockchain, remember when every company was releasing it's own coin? Even kodak got on it and got 10x for a week or so and 3x for a year. Investing money for free.
Market is Dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
News at 11.
"We're going to acquire the hardware the big players cant get because "
Re: (Score:2)
I appreciate the pun attempt but AI isn't walking in anyone's shoes, as the idiom implies taking the same path and putting in the same work to come to a similar understanding. If there is one thing the AI industry does not do it's have empathy for people who put in hard work studying, building, and creating to get where they were and instead thinks they should be allowed to just take all that work and use it to copy them for its own personal gains without paying their own dues.
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I don't think this is just dumb I think this is people running bots.
We saw exactly this behavior when blockchain and nft and crypto blew up where if a company just put those keywords into their name suddenly their stock shot up. Sometimes even if those words just ended up in their name by accident.
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I'm more inclined to think it's a pump-n-dump stock scam.
Which succeeded.
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To be fair we could both be right. You can use bots to do pump and dump pretty effectively.
And right now is a damn fine time to be doing those kind of scams. As long as you make sure you set aside a couple million bucks to buy a pardon you can do basically anything right now.
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> News at 11.
> "We're going to acquire the hardware the big players cant get because "
... because we have shoes, and can outrun the competition.