Google pays $10M to get its hands on Spirit Airlines’ business data for AI training
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley ● Covered by 5 sources
Google paid $10M for bankrupt Spirit Airlines’ internal business data. The prize is training fuel for AI, and it shows how valuable old company records have become.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
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Google just spent $10 million to buy a very unusual asset from bankrupt Spirit Airlines: huge amounts of the carrier’s internal business data. Bloomberg reported that Google beat out several rivals in the auction, including Mercor.io, the AI training data company.
The court notice describes a sprawling cache. It includes about 100 million company emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, plus software algorithms, development metadata, and records tied to revenue, aircraft operations, and employee productivity. That is the sort of material that can reveal how a business actually works, not just how it talks about itself.
Google did not get everything. The data set excludes Spirit’s 97.5 million passenger profiles and 50 million loyalty program records, which keeps the deal focused on internal operations rather than customer history.
Google says the information will be “rigorously scrubbed” of personally identifiable information by a third-party service provider before it is used. The company also says Spirit’s data is a valuable asset for improving its AI products and models. That fits a newer market that is starting to form around failed companies selling off emails, Slack messages and operational data to AI firms.
And that market is getting nastier by the month. Google, OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC have already chewed through much of the free material posted online, and now the race is moving into the leftovers from dead businesses. When fresh data gets scarce, the hunger for other people’s mess gets expensive fast.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of AI nobody puts on the demo slide: the models are so hungry they’re now shopping in bankruptcy court. There’s a clean business case here, sure, but it also shows how quickly “training data” turns into a bid for whatever corporate wreckage is lying around. Very efficient. Slightly grim.
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