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Chris Keall: NZ Herald senior business writer on Allbirds pivoting to AI · Best of Business

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  Speaker 2: Now all birdstock has sold six hundred percent on the
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  Speaker 2: news that they're ditching the shoes and switching to the
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  Speaker 2: AI chips. The company is going to be called New
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  Speaker 2: Birds AI. It's going to buy and then lease GPUs,
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  Speaker 2: which is the powerful chips used to train and run
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  Speaker 2: AI software and data centers. The Herald senior business writer
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  Speaker 2: Chris Keeler is with us on this high Chris, here
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  Speaker 2: is this legit? But they actually are they actually going
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  Speaker 2: to do this? And do they have the know how?
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  Speaker 3: This is the plan they're put in front of shareholders
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  Speaker 3: on Monday. They had been the shareholders were going to
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  Speaker 3: vote on dissolving the company and just having a payout
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  Speaker 3: from the thirty nine million that they sold it for,
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  Speaker 3: down from their four billion peak valuation. But now it's changed.
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  Speaker 3: So the shareholder is going to vote on this new
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  Speaker 3: AI plan. And I guess it'll be up to the
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  Speaker 3: shareholders whether they think that their shoe guys can be
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  Speaker 3: the aiy.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, there is absolutely no crossover, is there between
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  Speaker 2: making a pair of work shoes and doing the AI chips.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah. On social media, a number of sort of tech
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  Speaker 3: commentators have said, I'm just going to have a tall
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  Speaker 3: glass of iced teas I read this, and that was
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  Speaker 3: a reference bit to back in twenty seventeen when Eric
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  Speaker 3: Watson had a drinks company called Long Island Iced Tea
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  Speaker 3: making nice tea, and it changed its name to Long
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  Speaker 3: Island Blockchain to reflect its new focus on crypto, and
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  Speaker 3: unfortunately there proved to be no iced tea crypto crossover
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  Speaker 3: and skills, and that all went to heck and went
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  Speaker 3: out of business, and there's still litigation going on over that.
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  Speaker 2: Because it's a naming trick. Is it's to cash in
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  Speaker 2: on a crazy Can we rule that out as being
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  Speaker 2: what's going on here?
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  Speaker 3: It definitely led to big spoke in the shares. They
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  Speaker 3: went up seven hundred percent, though it's all relative because
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  Speaker 3: it was up to one hundred and eighty five million
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  Speaker 3: market caps, still way off its peak and even in
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  Speaker 3: after hours trading that the shares have. Bloomberg called it
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  Speaker 3: the most twenty twenty six move ever, which does sort
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  Speaker 3: of have hints of bandwigging jumping on AI. So Fortune
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  Speaker 3: called it wild. Financial Times said we'd suggest running the
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  Speaker 3: way as quickly as possible from what they called a
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  Speaker 3: meme stock if anyone can suggest a suitable brand of
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  Speaker 3: footwear for the task. So the tech and business press
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  Speaker 3: was sort of leaning on the bandwagon take on things
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  Speaker 3: for obvious reasons.
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  Speaker 2: Chris as always good to talk to you, mate, Thank
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  Speaker 2: you so much for your time.
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  Speaker 1: Man.
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  Speaker 2: It's Chris Keil, the Herald's Business senior business writer.
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