Google has won an auction to sell internal data from bankrupt airline Spirit Airlines. For $10 million, the tech giant will receive a vast archive of corporate communications, operational records and software that it plans to use to improve its products and train AI models.
Google has won an auction to sell internal data from bankrupt airline Spirit Airlines. For $10 million, the tech giant will receive a vast archive of corporate communications, operational records and software that it plans to use to improve its products and train AI models.
The final closing of the deal requires approval from a federal bankruptcy judge, whose hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, TechSpot writes .
According to court documents, the Spirit Airlines archive includes:
100 million employee emails;
500 million messages in Microsoft Teams;
17 million files in OneDrive and over 20 million SharePoint items;
516 code repositories containing about 30 million lines of specialized software.
In addition, Google will receive pricing models, crew scheduling data, financial databases, support materials, and customer service workflows.
The value of this data is that, unlike information from public sites, internal correspondence shows the real process of decision-making, coordination of teams and problem-solving in the business. This is critical for training autonomous AI agents.
Google’s initial offer was $5 million. During the bidding, AI startup Mercor raised the bar to $7.5 million, but Google won by increasing the amount to $10 million.
The company said the deal does not involve personal or financial data from passengers. The archive will be transferred to a third party, which will completely remove personally identifiable information (PII) from employees at Google’s expense. Google will also be legally prohibited from attempting to identify individuals from the cleaned data.
Spirit Airlines has finally ceased operations after failing to emerge from bankruptcy proceedings, and the sale of its digital assets has become the largest such case in the market for AI training data.
