These Allbirds AI jokes are as fire as the company's stock price

Allbirds is an AI company now and the rebranding is getting memed. Illustration by Timon Schneider/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images 2026-04-16T07:07:31.919Z Share Copy link Email Facebook WhatsApp X LinkedIn Bluesky Threads lighning bolt icon An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt.

Impact Link Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in. Allbirds is, for some reason, an AI company now. Some people on social media found that more than a little funny. The jokes did not disappoint. AI-generated summary Summaries are generated by an AI model trained on Business Insider's articles. AI may make mistakes or provide inaccurate/incomplete information. We're unable to load that answer right now. Please try again. Why did Allbirds pivot to AI? What challenges led to Allbirds' decline? How might this pivot affect Allbirds' future? How did social media react to the pivot? What is GPU compute-as-a-service? 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. Loading audio narration... 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 shoppingWith 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' memesThe 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 OuchHas 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%.