Smartbird pivots from shoes to AI infrastructure

In April, the shoe company Allbirds—known for “flimsy kicks”—pivoted to AI. The transition mirrored a strategy used by GameStop, a troubled public company that latched onto market trends to boost its stock. The maneuver succeeded: the company sold its shoe business for $43 million, raised $100 million from the stock market, and rebranded as Smartbird. The shoe business officially closed yesterday, which is also when Nadia Carlsten, a former AWS employee and former head of the European compute company DCAI, began her tenure as Smartbird’s CEO. Carlsten, who is based in Amsterdam, will receive a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to lead the transition.

Smartbird aims to operate as an AI infrastructure provider, but it is avoiding direct competition with hyperscalers or neoclouds—which are cloud providers that arbitrage chip prices against GPU time or inference tokens. Instead, Carlsten stated that Smartbird is competing with internal company projects. The startup is targeting customers who prioritize data sovereignty—the concept that data is subject to the laws and governance structures of the nation where it is collected—over the raw scalability of the public cloud. Carlsten noted that potential clients include organizations in the pharmaceutical, energy, financial, and public sectors, drawing on her experience at DCAI working with European firms like Novo Nordisk.

The company currently has no other employees, and Carlsten’s immediate focus is building a team. She noted that her first task is rounding up the leadership team, including finding someone to lead infrastructure operations. Smartbird faces competitors in the AI compute space, including Hewlett Packard and Equinix, as well as startups like General Compute, which came out of stealth last month with a $300 billion chip order. However, Carlsten expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of the year. While Smartbird is unlikely to compete with rivals on price, Carlsten believes specialized workflows will allow clients to operate more efficiently. Addressing the pivot, Nadia Carlsten, Smartbird’s CEO, told TechCrunch: “It wasn’t, ‘Let’s just do AI, because it’s AI, and it’s hot,’“

Why it matters

Smartbird’s pivot highlights the growing market for specialized AI infrastructure that prioritizes data sovereignty and control over the raw scalability offered by public cloud providers.