NewBird AI: Flying high
A pivot from sustainable footwear to AI compute infrastructure may not be the most obvious twist in a business’s progress, but that is what has happened to the company formerly known as Allbirds. Born in New Zealand but grown in San Francisco, Allbirds’ eco-friendly trainers rapidly became the shoe of choice for tech bros and celebrities alike, gracing the toes of everyone from Barack Obama to Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The fashion police raised a few eyebrows, and it’s hard not to think that the styling is something you’d be more likely to see on the feet of a mid-19th-century Russian peasant rather than on those of a mid-ranking coder in Cupertino. But the company made a lot of noise about its use of sustainable materials such as merino wool and recycled sugarcane. Sales rocketed initially, and when Allbirds listed in 2021 it briefly enjoyed a market capitalisation of more than $4bn before it entered a doom spiral of value destruction that ended when the shoe business was sold to American Exchange Group for a paltry $39m.
F Scott Fitzgerald may have lamented that “there are no second acts in American lives”, but he lived in a more innocent time, and all it took was a press release to announce that the Allbirds shell listing was pivoting towards AI compute infrastructure for the share price to enter meme stock heaven with a bounce of 580% in a day. It is raising $50m from an institutional investor, which in the AI infrastructure game is hardly an amuse-bouche, let alone a full menu — but it’s clearly caught the imagination and has been rebranded NewBird AI.
Stonegate: Debt burden gets heavy
It was the great PG Wodehouse who observed that “it has never been difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine”, and if he were around today he might have something similar to say about the average UK pub landlord. It can’t be easy to be dispensing endless bonhomie from behind the saloon bar when the taxman’s noose is getting ever tighter around your neck, nor to be fizzing with quick wit and gay repartee when you’re only one business rates bill away from shutting the doors permanently.
The total number of pubs in the UK has fallen from about 65,000 in the 1990s to fewer than 45,000, and about four pubs a day are expected to close this year. Stonegate is the biggest pub firm in the country, with more than 4,000 boozers, and it is suffering as much as any from a toxic combination of soaring costs, an ever-increasing tax burden and a decline in demand as the punters take one look at the price of a pint and head to the off-licence outlet instead.
But where Stonegate is really struggling is in dealing with the £3.8bn of debt it has amassed since the group was created by private equity company TDR Capital in 2010, which then racked up a string of acquisitions. In the year to September 2025 it spent £441m to service its debt as it sank to a loss of £174m, while it sold 109 pubs and is looking at its options for about 1,000 freehold properties that might put a proper dent in the debt mountain.
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