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Allbirds, the quarter-zip of footwear, is leaving shoes behind to become an AI infrastructure company

Allbirds shares rocketed higher on Wednesday.

4/15/26 8:52AM

Shares of onetime elder millennial footwear fave Allbirds are going absolutely vertical in Wednesday trading, following the company’s announcement that it is pivoting from shoes to, what else, AI.

Allbirds shares spiked Wednesday after the company’s announcement, which comes a few weeks after it entered into an agreement to sell its brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million.

Per Allbirds’ press release today:

“Allbirds, Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) (the ‘Company’) today announced the execution of a definitive agreement with an institutional investor for a $50 million convertible financing facility (the ‘Facility’). The Facility, which is expected to close during the second quarter of 2026, will enable the Company to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. In connection with this pivot, the Company anticipates changing its name to ‘NewBird AI.’”

The new company, NewBird AI, expects to use its initial capital to “acquire high-performance GPU assets, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity.”

Allbirds’ move draws parallels to previous tech-focused pivots like Long Island Iced Tea’s late 2017 shift from iced tea toward the “exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology.” That move initially sent the stock surging, closing up more than 180%. The company was delisted a few months later.

In its SEC filing on Wednesday, Allbirds added that, given its new focus, it will ask stockholders to approve a proposal to remove “references to the company being operated for the environmental conservation public benefit.”

“The rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet,” the company said.

NewBird AI is hoping that serving that compute demand can get it back to the $4 billion valuation it had when it went public, and that selling GPUs to tech executives will prove a longer-lasting trend than selling semi-sustainable shoes to those same executives.

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Alaska Air expects higher fuel costs to add $600 million in expenses in Q2

Alaska Airlines on Monday kicked off a big week for airline earnings, reporting its first-quarter results after the bell. The stock ticked down after hours.

Alaska Air reported:

An adjusted loss of $1.68 per share, compared to Wall Street estimates of a loss of $1.65 per share.
$3.3 billion in revenue, compared to estimates of $3.29 billion.
A 17% year-over-year increase in fuel costs to $796 million.

Looking ahead, Alaska said it expects a second-quarter loss per share of $1, deeper than the Wall Street consensus (-$0.15). The company expects April fuel costs of $4.75/gallon and for fuel across the second quarter to add $600 million in expenses.

“Absent the fuel price spike, we would have guided to a solidly profitable quarter,” the airline said in its release.

Alaska Air, like the rest of the commercial airline industry, has been pummeled by fuel costs since the beginning of the war in Iran. Along with Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue, the carrier recently hiked its bag fees to offset higher fuel costs.

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Fermi is down more than 18% in premarket trading after it disclosed in regulatory filings that its now former CEO, Toby Neugebauer, and its CFO, Miles Everson, departed on Friday and Monday, respectively.

The company dubbed its executive shake-up as “Fermi 2.0.” In addition to ousting Neugebauer and Everson, Fermi added Marius Haas as chairman of its board and Jeffrey S. Stein as director of the board.

Fermi, which was cofounded by former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, plans to build nuclear energy infrastructure to power data centers. But the cost to build out its power site is mounting while it still doesn’t have any customers secured, according its annual report released on March 30.

In September, Fermi announced that it had entered into a nonbinding letter of intent with a tenant to lease a portion of its Project Matador power grid site in Amarillo, Texas. That contract was terminated in December.

The company, which went public in October, is down about 75% from its IPO through Friday’s close.

Allbirds, the quarter-zip of footwear, is leaving shoes behind to become an AI infrastructure company

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