Once in a while, something happens in tech land that’s prime meme fodder. The latest: A shoe company suddenly — and seemingly inexplicably — pivots to go all in on AI.
Allbirds found itself the subject of many jokes on social media on Wednesday. Investors in the long-beleaguered company, though, had something to celebrate. Its stock price shot through the roof after it rebranded itself as NewBird AI and said it would provide GPU compute-as-a-service.
Have a look at some of these top-tier comedy offerings:
#1 As Ross Geller once yelled in a legendary ‘Friends’ episode: ‘PIVOT!’
Allbirds with a generational business pivot https://t.co/iSLotjMCoT pic.twitter.com/2YIm02xAjv
— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) April 15, 2026
#2 Someone’s going shopping
With Allbirds shoes getting winded down, I’ve started buying hundreds of allbirds shoes for 50 cents on the dollar.
So far, i have amassed a portfolio of 15,000 Allbirds shoes.
Soon I will control the entire Allbirds market.— Finance Guy (@GuyInFinance) April 15, 2026
#3 Enter ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ memes
The name of the company… NewBird AI. It is a cutting-edge, AI-native cloud infrastructure firm out of- well, they used to be out of San Francisco making sneakers, but forget that, John- they are now awaiting imminent deployment of next-generation GPU compute clusters that have… pic.twitter.com/ArYT41hx8J
— Negligible Capital (@negligible_cap) April 15, 2026
#4 Ouch
Has Nike considered pivoting from shoes to AI datacenters? pic.twitter.com/yEd2ws97I2
— Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA Esq. (@ParikPatelCFA) April 15, 2026
#5 Well, what if?
what if we kissed at the intersection of footwear and AI pic.twitter.com/tMcae3UQxu
— alli (@sonofalli) April 15, 2026
Allbirds, founded in 2015, quickly rose to fame for its wool sneaker, becoming a Silicon Valley tech bro favorite. Former President Barack Obama was spotted wearing a pair in 2020.
It was a Wall Street darling as well. During the company’s trading debut in 2021, its valuation reached $4 billion.
But things started crashing after 2022, when the shoe lost its shine. In 2023, Allbirds posted an annual loss of $101 million, and its shares plummeted 47%.
In the years since, it launched products that flopped, laid off staff, and went through a management shake-up, none of which helped turn things around.
In March, Allbirds announced that American Exchange Group, a New York-based fashion and consumer company, would buy it for $39 million.
After Wednesday’s AI pivot, its shares rose by about 582%. There was a slight correction in after-hours trading, when the price dropped 28%.
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