Remember GoPro?
For a while, the little action-camera company was everywhere. Skiers had GoPros. Mountain bikers had GoPros. YouTubers had GoPros. Porn stars had GoPros. Your uncle probably bought one before going snorkeling in Hawaii and then never used it again.
Now GoPro is apparently getting into AI data centers, defense, government, robotics, and aerospace.
Because it is 2026, and if your existing business isn’t working, the legally prescribed remedy seems to be adding the letters “AI” somewhere in the investor presentation.
GoPro has been struggling in recent years. It was founded in 2002 and went public in 2014. For a while, its formula was magic. Because it made action cameras, people used them when doing very exciting things, which made for great footage, which then had others asking “hey, what did you use to record that?” Lather, rinse, repeat.
Fun fact: the GoPro CEO was the highest paid CEO of any public company in 2014, earning more than $284 million dollars that year.
For a while, GoPro could do no wrong. But then two factors crushed them
The first was the inevitable rise of knockoffs. Maybe GoPro was still the best product, but once you have competitors making cheap alternatives that are “80% as good,” a large part of the market will defect. Some people need that gold-star quality, but a lot of people don’t.
The second was the smart phone. GoPro was born before the iPhone existed and really came of age in the pre-smartphone era. It timed is IPO wonderfully, because by the late 2010s, everyone had a device in their pocket that did a lot of what the GoPro did. Sure, if you wanted to strap a camera on your head as you did some crazy X sport, GoPro was probably still the go-to, but as with the knockoffs, the alternative – here something you already likely had – chipped away at the market.
Since then, it’s been a long slow slide for GoPro. They tried different marketing, tried to get into drones, and other things, but the company has not been doing well.
And Now It’s an “AI Company”
GoPro announced September 1 that it has agreed to merge with Starman Optical, a privately held optical-photonics company. Starman makes optical transceivers, the hardware used to move enormous amounts of data around high-speed networks, including the sort of infrastructure being built for AI data centers.
While this is being described as a “merger,” economically it looks a lot like Starman using GoPro as the publicly traded vehicle for a much broader business, chock full of magic words: “AI infrastructure”, “data centers”, etc.
GoPro says its traditional camera business isn’t disappearing. The company intends to continue selling consumer cameras, subscriptions, and cloud services. But the growth story investors are being pitched now has considerably less to do with filming yourself snowboarding and considerably more to do with optical networking and national security.
Wait, Haven’t We Seen This Before?
Yup. Remember Allbirds? They were a sustainable shoe company, which recently sold off all of its footware operations and announced it was going to be an AI-focused business called NewBird AI.
Yes, it really was just that bizarre. One minute they’re selling shoes, the next minute tokens.
The comparison isn’t perfect, but the pattern is amusingly familiar:
- Build a consumer brand.
- Go public at an enthusiastic valuation.
- Watch the original business struggle.
- See the stock collapse.
- Find something involving AI.
- Tell Wall Street about the exciting new future.
GoPro has certainly completed steps one through four.
After its 2014 IPO, GoPro shares briefly traded above $98. They were around $1 before this week’s fireworks, representing a destruction of more than $10 billion in market value from the company’s peak.
After the Starman announcement, GoPro rose more than 40%. Meme stonk goes brrrrp?
It’s hard to understand what GoPro brings to a company making optical equipment. There is presumably a real technology business in making optical transceivers…perhaps something in GoPro’s patent portfolio helps. Or they have some manufacturing expertise? Or…what, exactly?
Welcome to the AI boom. Apparently, everyone gets a turn.
raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
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