A Shoe Brand Transforms Into an AI Infrastructure Provider
Allbirds, known in Silicon Valley for its comfortable, minimally designed wool sneakers that became a staple of the tech worker uniform, announced that it has sold off its shoe business and, with a $50 million investment, launched an AI infrastructure company called NewBird AI. With no technical background, the fact that it managed to reach a valuation in a single day – one it couldn’t achieve in years with physical products – by riding the wave of GPU demand and the AI trend drew plenty of attention.
Another AI Experiment From Meta
Dissatisfied with the performance of its open-source Llama models, Meta hired Scale AI’s CEO and jumped into the closed-model race with a new entrant. The new model family, named Muse Spark, is a multimodal architecture capable of generating audio, images, and text. Like other advanced models, it also features reasoning and understanding capabilities. What caught our attention, though, was that Meta didn’t share any of the benchmark comparisons typically included when a new language model is announced. The likely reason? Its ranking appears to start from a fairly low position on the leaderboard.
Amazon’s Move Into Space
Amazon acquired satellite network provider GlobalStar to clearly show how committed it is to competing directly with Starlink. Just a few days earlier, Amazon had also announced an in-flight wifi system – another segment where Starlink is the market leader – signaling an ambitious entry into this market.
While matching Starlink’s satellite count in the short term looks difficult, Amazon says it plans to place 3,200 additional satellites into Earth’s orbit by 2029.
As orbital data centers also gradually come online, this space is shifting from a single-player race into a broader ecosystem where multiple companies compete.
