• Allbirds has been rebranded as Smartbird. Instead of selling shoes, it's an AI infrastructure provider.
• Nadia Carlsten, the new CEO, spoke exclusively to Business Insider about her plans.
• She wants to build custom, single-tenant AI infrastructure for mid-market enterprises.

A few years ago, Allbirds was Silicon Valley's favorite sneaker company. Now it's betting its future on AI infrastructure.

After selling off its footwear business and shedding most of its workforce, the company formerly known for its eco-friendly wool sneakers has reinvented itself as Smartbird, an AI infrastructure provider led by a CEO who has never worn its signature shoes.

The transformation is one of the most dramatic pivots of the AI boom and a test of whether a struggling public consumer company can transition into an AI company.

"I'm more of a high heels person myself," Nadia Carlsten told Business Insider in an exclusive interview. "I'm blissfully unaware of all things Allbirds."

For those unaware, Allbirds launched in 2015 and quickly became one of tech's hottest consumer brands, with its sneakers as much a part of the Silicon Valley uniform as hoodies and Patagonia vests.

After going public in 2021, Allbirds was worth nearly $4 billion. But the brand's cool factor faded almost as quickly as it arrived. By early 2025, Allbirds' market value had fallen below $20 million.

Then, in April, the company announced an only-in-2026 pivot: It would no longer sell shoes and instead become an AI infrastructure provider, going head-to-head with the likes of Amazon, CoreWeave, and Crusoe.

Some ridiculed the move as "bizarre," or even "ridiculous and concerning." Wall Street was more enthusiastic, with the stock briefly soaring 800% on the news, though it has since lost much of its gains.

The transformation became official on Wednesday as the company said that it has completed the sale of the Allbirds brand and footwear assets, changed its legal name to Smartbird, and appointed Carlsten as president and CEO. She replaces Joe Vernachio, who is resigning from the company and the board of directors.

Carlsten was previously CEO of the Danish Centre for AI Innovation. She also managed product portfolios at SandboxAQ and launched the quantum computing service at Amazon Web Services.

With nearly the entire company's staff gone, Carlsten is starting from scratch, except for the same BIRD ticker symbol that trades on the NASDAQ.

Business Insider spoke with Carlsten about her plans. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

BI: Did you ever imagine you would be working at Allbirds, and it would not be a shoe company, but an AI infrastructure play?

Carlsten: I've been around the block in Silicon Valley. It's not that unusual. Slack started as a game. Twitter started as a podcast. SpaceX started as a rocket company and is now doing AI infrastructure. So there's precedent for some of this.

Everybody's trying to be in the AI infrastructure space. This is probably not the most typical way to get into it, but we have a really good plan and strategy.

In a few months, people won't even remember the shoes.

BI: What does the company you're taking over look like at this stage?

Carlsten: The important thing to remember is that the shoe business has been sold, so anybody who was dedicated to the retail business is no longer part of the company. My first task is to hire the team. This is a brand-new company with brand-new people.

BI: Why not just start a new company?

Carlsten: In many ways, it is like a startup. I'm going to be growing a team, developing a new business model, approaching customers, and growing a pipeline of customers.

There are also some advantages to being a public company. One of them is access to capital. We have an easier time as we're looking at acquisitions and partnering with others in the industry. The liquidity makes it a lot easier to recruit.

In AI, speed is key. So why would you want to do things more slowly if you can do it faster?

BI: You're also now running a public company from day one, which brings a lot of scrutiny. Are you worried about that?

Carlsten: AI fluctuates, whether it's public or private. This is a business that is never static. AI is moving incredibly fast.

Customers are demanding things very differently than they were just a couple of months ago. So I don't think that makes much of a difference in how we will build the business.

BI: What exactly is Smartbird going to do?

Carlsten: We are an AI infrastructure company, and what makes us different is that we are focusing on the mid-market, such as enterprises that are in the pharma space or financial services space, and also countries that are interested in sovereign AI or having regional AI infrastructure accessible to them.

All of these players are doing more AI. They have more needs for persistent AI infrastructure, but at the same time, for whatever reason, they cannot use or won't use the public clouds. They are very interested in making sure their proprietary data does not enter a shared multi-tenant infrastructure system.

Right now, their choices are either shared infrastructure or building their own. And most of the people that I talk to in this space want to do more AI, but that doesn't mean that they want to build that AI infrastructure. Right now, they're doing it because they have to.

BI: You're going up against Amazon, Google, CoreWeave, and a lot of other established players. How do you plan to compete?

Carlsten: We're not competing head-on with hyperscalers like AWS or Azure or even large neoclouds like CoreWeave. Those guys are very good at building massive-scale shared infrastructure, which is the opposite of what we want to be doing.

We will focus on customers who need AI infrastructure at a smaller scale. Usually, they want single-tenant infrastructure, something that looks like a GPU cluster that they own and can fully control without having the disadvantages of managing the stack themselves.

BI: Where are you getting the GPUs from?

Carlsten: We'll be sourcing from multiple vendors. One of the things we'll be offering customers is the flexibility to build something specifically for their requirements.

BI: Are you going to buy the infrastructure or lease it?

Carlsten: We will purchase the infrastructure and build it out on behalf of the customer. We're not building ahead of demand. We are building something for specific customers.

We can be a lot more agile than the bigger players.

• Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have paused new data center projects until late 2027.
• Mills cited her support for an existing project and said she wanted to study data center impacts.
• Lawmakers in at least 12 states have tried and failed to ban data centers as local resistance grows.

Another state-level effort to ban new data center development just failed, this time in Maine.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills on Friday vetoed a bill that would have put a pause on data centers in the state until late 2027. Mills said she supports a moratorium on data center projects but that the bill, which passed the state House and Senate his month, did not include an exemption for a project already underway.

"A moratorium is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates," Mills said in a letter to the state legislature. "But the final version of this bill fails to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay that enjoys strong local support from its host community and region."

A statement shared by her office said the $550 million data center redevelopment project was needed in Jay, where a paper mill closure in 2023 "eliminated hundreds of good-paying jobs and dealt a significant blow to the local economy."

The governor said she would have signed the bill had there been a carve-out for the project, which she said is expected to create over 800 construction jobs and at least 100 high-paying permanent jobs in addition to generating property tax revenue.

Mills, a Democrat who is running for US Senate in 2026, said she plans to issue an executive order to create a council to look at the impact of data centers in Maine.

"I believe it necessary and important to examine and plan for the potential impacts of large-scale data centers in Maine, as the use of artificial intelligence becomes more widespread," she said.

Lawmakers in at least 11 other states have also tried and failed to pass legislation that would temporarily ban new data center development, Business Insider previously reported.

The data center boom, fueled by Big Tech's AI ambitions, has sparked pockets of local resistance across the US amid concerns about energy consumption and impact on energy costs as well as the environment.

A Business Insider investigation found Maine had two data centers in the state as of last year.