en.Wedoany.com Reported - U.S. footwear company Allbirds has completed its transformation into AI infrastructure provider Smartbird, with new CEO Nadia Carlsten officially taking office today. She holds a PhD in engineering, previously served as an executive at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and most recently led European computing company DCAI. The company secured $43 million from selling its footwear business and raised $100 million from the stock market before rebranding as Smartbird. Carlsten stated that she will recruit an entirely new team for the AI business and establish offices, with the footwear business officially closing yesterday.
Smartbird positions itself as an AI infrastructure provider, targeting the demand for computing resources needed to train and run deep learning models. Unlike Neocloud, which profits from arbitrage between chip prices and the cost of GPU time or inference tokens, Smartbird will focus on providing customers with more carefully managed deployments. Its ideal customers require direct control over the servers running their models, often prioritizing data sovereignty over the scalability of public clouds for political or business model reasons. Carlsten believes this positioning means Smartbird is not competing with hyperscale clouds or Neocloud, but rather with companies' internal IT projects.
The size of this market is currently unclear. Carlsten noted that many companies are still piloting AI tools, making the market quite nascent. During her tenure at European computing company DCAI, clients included Novo Nordisk and European enterprises with particular interest in data sovereignty or operating custom models, spanning pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, and the public sector. Established players already exist in this space, such as Hewlett Packard and Equinix, both offering single-tenant managed AI computing services. Other startups have shown greater ambition; inference cloud General Compute announced $300 billion in chip orders when it emerged from stealth mode last month.
Carlsten expects to deploy computing clusters for multiple clients by year-end. She indicated that potential customer demand ranges from hundreds to thousands of chips, with the focus not on massive scale and large GPU counts, but on cluster agility and greater control over the infrastructure stack. Smartbird is unlikely to compete on price with rivals, but Carlsten believes companies with specialized workflows can use their own servers more efficiently.
Regarding the company's transformation, Carlsten emphasized it was not merely chasing the AI trend, but rather considering whether a market niche could be found for long-term growth. She will receive an annual salary of $700,000 along with approximately $9 million in stock as compensation. During the transition, the company abandoned its Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) status from its footwear days, which was originally used to emphasize sustainability commitments. Smartbird's board has made long-term commitments to execute its AI strategy.
Carlsten told TechCrunch: "Some companies are now chasing AI, but at the end of the day, what matters is whether there is substance behind the chase?"
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