Smartbird CEO Nadia Carlsten plans AI infrastructure relaunch

Smartbird hired Nadia Carlsten as its CEO and is positioning itself as an AI infrastructure provider after selling the shoe business for $43 million and raising another $100 million from the stock market. Carlsten began yesterday as CEO, and the shoe business "has officially closed as of yesterday," she said.

Who is Nadia Carlsten and what resources does Smartbird have?

Nadia Carlsten is a former AWS executive with an engineering PhD who most recently led the European compute company DCAI, and she started yesterday as Smartbird’s CEO. The company sold its shoe business for $43 million and raised $100 million from the stock market, and Carlsten will be paid a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to take the job.

Carlsten said her first priorities are hiring leadership and building an operational team: "We’re going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and we’re going to be getting an office," she said. She also said the board made a long‑term commitment to execute her AI strategy.

How will Smartbird position itself in the AI infrastructure market?

Smartbird aims to sell managed, single‑tenant AI compute clusters to customers that need direct control over servers and value data sovereignty over cheap public cloud scale. Carlsten framed the target customers as organizations that want to control the infrastructure stack for political or business‑model reasons, giving examples of industries that showed interest at her prior company: pharmaceutical, energy, financial, and the public sector.

She said Smartbird’s customers typically need compute in the range of "hundreds to thousands of chips," and that the business is not about building the largest possible GPU farms but about agility and control of clusters. Carlsten argued Smartbird is not trying to out‑price hyperscalers; public cloud providers optimize chip usage to offer the cheapest compute. Instead, Smartbird will compete with internal company projects and established single‑tenant offerings such as Hewlett Packard’s managed AI compute service and Equinix’s data center managed services.

Carlsten did not provide an estimate of the total market size, calling it nascent while many companies still pilot AI tools. She expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of the year.

Why does this pivot matter?

The move shows how a consumer retail brand can pivot entirely into enterprise AI infrastructure after monetizing its legacy business: Allbirds sold its shoe unit, raised fresh capital, and rebranded as Smartbird. That transition also ended the company’s public benefit corporation status, removing the legal framework that had tied the brand to sustainability commitments. The hire of an experienced infrastructure executive and the size of the compensation package underscore a serious commitment from the board, even as the firm starts with no employees and a road map centered on smaller, controlled clusters rather than hyperscale economics.

Smartbird’s strategy targets customers for whom data sovereignty and control matter more than the lowest token or GPU-hour price. That demand sits alongside other market signals that have pushed investment into chips, cloud, and energy; the article noted peers with larger chip ambitions, for example the startup General Compute, which announced a $300 billion chip order when it emerged from stealth.

What to watch

Watch whether Smartbird can deliver the first customer clusters by the end of the year and whether those deployments follow Carlsten’s "hundreds to thousands of chips" sizing. Also monitor whether Smartbird wins customers who prioritize data sovereignty over price, and whether the company makes any sizable, long‑term chip or data‑center commitments.