Allbirds, rebranded as Smartbird, has raised $143 million（約230億円） total to build an AI infrastructure company focused on customers needing direct control over their servers rather than public cloud services.

What happened: The shoe company Allbirds sold its shoe business for $43 million（約69億円） and raised another $100 million（約160億円） from the stock market, then rebranded as Smartbird. Former AWS executive Nadia Carlsten, who holds an engineering PhD, began as CEO yesterday to build out the company's AI infrastructure business from scratch, starting with recruiting a leadership team and securing office space.

Why it matters: Smartbird is targeting a specific niche—companies in pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, and the public sector that need data sovereignty (control over where their data and models live) rather than the scalability of large public cloud providers. This represents a real but narrower market than the dominant cloud services that Carlsten does not expect to compete with directly.

What to watch: Carlsten expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of the year. Unlike rivals pursuing large chip orders, she believes Smartbird's customers need only hundreds to thousands of chips and value agility and infrastructure control over raw scale. Carlsten is being paid a $700,000 annual salary and awarded stock worth about $9 million（約14億円）.