Smartbird’s CEO – Allbirds has sold its shoe business for $43 million and rebranded as Smartbird, an AI infrastructure company. Its new CEO, former AWS executive Nadia Carlsten, says the AI business is just beginning—she’s still recruiting a leadership team and plans to build c
Amsterdam is where the shoe sale becomes something else—something with servers.
Nadia Carlsten arrived to lead Smartbird yesterday, stepping into the job with a clear first priority: find the people. “We’re going to be recruiting a brand-new team for the AI business. and we’re going to be getting an office. ” she told MISRYOUM from Amsterdam. “The shoe business has officially closed as of yesterday. so that’s all done … The first task that I’m tackling right now is rounding up the leadership team. looking for somebody to lead infrastructure operations. for example.”.
It’s an unusual start for a company betting its future on AI infrastructure. But the path to this moment was always designed to chase momentum.
Allbirds’ pivot to AI began in April, and it quickly turned from a punchline into a market play. The public shoe seller sold its shoe business for $43 million. raised another $100 million from the stock market. and now operates as Smartbird. The company’s new story is about compute—training and running deep learning models—served in a way that isn’t built around the relentless price-arbitrage of neoclouds.
Smartbird wants to be a provider of managed AI infrastructure where customers can keep direct control over the servers running their models. Carlsten frames the demand as coming from political or business-model reasons. with data sovereignty—rather than public-cloud convenience—at the center of what those customers value.
She also draws a line between Smartbird and the big cloud giants. In her view. the competition isn’t primarily hyperscalers or neoclouds. but internal company projects—teams that are already building or piloting AI in-house. Carlsten argues the market itself is still early, because many companies are still just piloting AI tools.
At DCAI. where she most recently led a European compute company. Carlsten worked with companies including Novo Nordisk. and she says her experience focused on organizations that care about data sovereignty and operate bespoke models. “We certainly have anybody that’s within the pharmaceutical industry, energy industry, financial, the public sector,” she said.
That niche could be a fit—because even in a crowded AI compute landscape, sovereignty-driven buyers tend to have specialized needs. But there’s a hurdle Smartbird can’t dodge: the business model is real, yet the scale question is still open.
Hewlett Packard offers a single-tenant managed AI compute service. and Equinix—well-known as a data center giant—offers its own managed options. Carlsten acknowledges the difference between serving a limited set of carefully selected customers and the expansion-driven culture of cloud services. where growth is the point.
She said she expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of the year. Other startups are already pitching far larger ambitions: General Compute, for example, announced a $300 billion chip order when it came out of stealth last month.
Carlsten’s response to the scaling question is blunt. She says she doesn’t need massive chip commitments to make Smartbird’s vision work. Her potential customers are in the range of hundreds to thousands of chips. she argues. and it’s “not about large scales and huge numbers of GPUs; they’re more about agility of these clusters. and more about having control of the infrastructure stack.”.
She also expects Smartbird will struggle to win on price against cloud providers. Cloud services optimize chip usage 24 hours a day to offer the cheapest compute. and Carlsten says she suspects specialized workflows could let companies work more efficiently with their own servers—efficiency that’s hard to match with blanket pricing.
Even with that, the broader market signal is impossible to ignore. Demand for AI infrastructure is already pushing stock prices for chipmakers. cloud providers. and energy companies. and it has helped convince investors that orbital data centers could be a feasible idea. Carlsten insists Allbirds’ shift was not a leap taken just because AI was hot.
“It wasn’t, ‘Let’s just do AI, because it’s AI, and it’s hot,’” Carlsten said. She is set to be paid a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to take the job. “It was really about. do we have a chance to build a business over time that is going to find this niche in the market and be able to grow over time?”.
There’s another tension embedded in the move—one that goes beyond competition and into identity. When Allbirds pivoted to AI, one thing fell away: its public benefit corporation (PBC) status. The PBC designation had been intended to enshrine the sustainability commitments tied to the shoe company’s pitch. PBC charters are often used by companies to highlight non-financial promises; OpenAI is a PBC with a focus on AI safety. Carlsten’s remarks suggest that, in practice, PBC status may not be ironclad when a company changes direction.
What remains, according to her, is whether the chase has weight behind it.
Smartbird’s board has made a long-term commitment to execute against Carlsten’s AI strategy, she said. And when she spoke about companies “chasing AI,” her focus landed on the same question—less hype, more proof.
“There are some companies out there chasing AI,” she told MISRYOUM, “but at the end of the day, what matters is, is there actual weight behind the chasing?”
Allbirds Smartbird Nadia Carlsten AI infrastructure data sovereignty GPU clusters hyperscalers Equinix Hewlett Packard DCAI Novo Nordisk cloud computing