A shoe brand, a karaoke act and a chicken chain walk into a data center

Napster, the late-90s peer-to-peer music-file-sharing service, is back. But it has left the music industry behind, and has a new business plan based on cloning teachers.

And, of course, it is heavily promoting its use of AI.

The pivot of all pivots

Napster, now owned by a company called Infinite Reality, struck a deal with Gems Education in Dubai. The plan was to build digital twins of instructors that students could ping with questions day and night. The music streaming service it later became had quietly shut down in January.

Napster is not alone. Allbirds spent years selling wool sneakers to people in Silicon Valley before going out of style. In April, it announced a move into AI computing, and the stock jumped 582% in a day. A day later, Myseum, a social network, added ".AI" to its name and revealed plans for AI agents on its platform. Shares popped 146% the next day of trading.

Algorhythm, a tiny former karaoke company, talked up an AI tool for trucking in February. Its shares shot up 450%. Trucking stocks briefly lost about $17 billion, which is a lot of damage for a karaoke company.

Chicken Claypot, a restaurant that, you guessed it, was better known for serving chicken dishes, announced in July that it would provide maintenance services for data centers.

Hoth Therapeutics, a cancer drug developer, renamed itself Rocket One and announced a push into semiconductors and the "orbital economy." That came two months after its auditor raised doubts about whether it would survive.

Some of these haven’t proven to be quite so insane as they sound.

Algorhythm's AI logistics business reported $3 million in revenue in the second quarter, up 161% from a year earlier, and said it had expanded a contract with Procter & Gamble. 

Myseum got into AMD's AI developer program and later said AWS would fund part of its AI development. Rocket One is still advancing Hoth's old biotech programs under a subsidiary while trying to build its new semiconductor business.

Even Chicken Claypot has an actual $50 million contract. We just don't know who the customer is. The company says the three-year deal covers maintenance and technical support for data centers in Malaysia, with the possibility of expanding elsewhere. The customer's identity is confidential under an NDA.

AI all the way down

Companies had tried this before. Stocks that tacked ".com" onto their names in the late 1990s beat the market by 72% within 10 days. Long Island Iced Tea became Long Blockchain in 2017 and rose 500%, although it ended up in some SEC hot water over it.

It mostly hasn’t worked this time. The Financial Times counted at least 27 companies that renamed themselves or announced an AI focus since 2023, and their combined value more than doubled at the peak. By the end of September, more than half of that was gone. Seven were worth less than before they said a word. For Chicken Claypot, the stock is down more than 70% since the announcement. Allbirds, which became Smartbird in June, is down more than 80% from the pop, but only 18% down from the beginning of the year.

The move carried some risk. The SEC had been warning about "AI washing" since 2023, and in March 2024 it settled its first cases against two investment advisers that claimed to use AI when they didn't.

Those were investment firms, not public companies. But the SEC's chair at the time, Gary Gensler, said that AI washing by companies could break securities laws too.

But for some of these companies, this might be worth a Hail Mary. Most weren’t exactly thriving, and we don't really know what would have happened if these companies hadn't pivoted.

It's not quite a SPAC, but it has some of the same appeal. The corporate structure, ticker, and shareholders are already there. You just need a new story about what the company is going to do. And there is no better story than AI in 2026.

Nearly every top performer in the S&P 500 this year sold something that went into or came out of a data center. AI’s buildout and investments account for roughly one-third to one-half of recent U.S. economic growth. Who would want to miss out?

—Jackie Snow, Contributing Editor