Well that's what you'd call a pivot. Allbirds, the once buzzy Silicon Valley shoe brand, is not going to make shoes anymore (though the brand may live on?), and instead it's going to become an AI company.

Yes, it will apparenly be called NewBird AI. What branch of the AI industry will they be in, you ask? As KRON4 is reporting, NewBird AI will be "a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider."

This news follows last week's news that Allbirds had sold off its wool sneaker business and brand assets for $39 million to American Exchange Group, a brand management company — which means, presumably, that Allbirds shoes will still be around. The last standalone Allbirds retail store, in Hayes Valley, closed two months ago.

How does a shoe company become a GPUaaS and AI-native cloud solutions provider? As the Chronicle reports, Allbirds says that it has secured a $50 million convertible financing agreement with an unnamed institutional investor, and it will be using that money to buy high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), and will then lease that computing power to others.

In a statement, the company says, "The rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet."

News of the pivot to NewBird AI sent Allbirds shares soaring, and its stock price is currently up over 600% — having closed Tuesday at $2.49, and potentially closing above $18 today.

One day, trendy sneakers, the next day, compute infrastructure. This is the world we're living in.