Allbirds traded more than JPMorgan and Exxon Mobil yesterday

After a surprising announcement that the tech bro shoemaker would be pivoting to AI on Wednesday, shares of Allbirds were flying high — soaring nearly 600% by the end of the day in record trading volume.

This was, for many reasons, completely insane.

Flipping the BIRD

Before the latest pop, Allbirds had a miniscule market cap of some ~$22 million. Yesterday, some $3.8 billion changed hands in BIRD — with the company’s market cap ending the session at a still small $148 million.

That means that the company turned over more than 25x its market cap in trading volume. Indeed, there were no other stocks with a market cap less than $1 billion that traded more than $1 billion yesterday — something of an outlier, to say the least.

Two of the stocks that Allbirds out-traded were none other than the world’s largest bank (JPMorgan) and America’s largest oil company (Exxon Mobil), which only turned over $3 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively. And those weren’t even particularly low-volume days for those two corporate giants — Allbirds’ insane activity was way ahead of the average of the last 120 days for each.

Sole searching

Though this was perhaps more of a meme stock story than an AI story, those two worlds are starting to overlap, as retail traders have bought up anything adjacent to AI — particularly in the last couple of weeks, as risk-on assets have ripped higher since geopolitical risks have (seemingly) abated and indexes are back to all-time highs.

Of course, we’ve seen this movie before: remember Algorhythm Holdings, a former karaoke maker turned AI trucking logistics company, which obliterated the freight industry only a few months ago? Then there was the Long Island Iced Tea Corp., which, naturally, got into the blockchain.

Allbirds’ latest pivot, with a “long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider,” which will be funded with its new $50 million convertible financing facility, is unlikely to concern neocloud leaders like CoreWeave, which is planning to spend $30 billion in 2026.