Google Pays $10 Million for Spirit Airlines Data to Train AI Models

Spirit Airlines data: Google chose its own anonymisation agent

Everyone reporting this deal leaned on one word: deidentified. The sale agreement filed on 14 August says the buyer designates the agent, the buyer pays for the work, and the scrub must preserve referential integrity across the data set. Google has agreed to pay $10mn for what a dead airline knew. A judge considers the sale on Wednesday morning. Reuters reported the price on Monday. Every account of the deal rests on one word. The data is deidentified, so nobody need worry. The Spirit Airlines data sale agreement, filed with the bankruptcy court on 14 August, says three things about that process which have gone unreported. Read together they change what the word is worth. Google picks the firm that does the scrubbing Coverage has described an independent third party cleaning the data before Google receives it. The contract is more specific. Spirit must deliver the material to one or more third parties "acceptable to or designated by Buyer". Google chooses the agent. Google also pays. The agreement makes the buyer solely responsible for every cost of deidentification, and states that those costs do not reduce the purchase price. The $10mn is the headline, not the bill. Google then gets to inspect the work. Spirit must give the buyer a reasonable opportunity to review and comment on the process. It must give good faith consideration to those comments. The standard is a scrub reasonably satisfactory to Google. None of that is improper. It is standard commercial drafting. It is simply not what an independent audit sounds like. The scrub has to keep the records linked This is the clause that matters most, and it is the one nobody quoted. The agent must certify the work against the California Consumer Privacy Act standard. Health-related material goes to the federal health privacy rule. Both apply whether or not those laws would otherwise reach this data, which is a real protection. Then the sentence ends with a condition. The certification must hold "while preserving referential integrity across the data set". Referential integrity means the joins survive. The joins survive by design. One pseudonymous person still runs from an email, to a support ticket, to a code commit, to a payroll record. That is exactly what makes the archive valuable for training agents. It is also the property that makes any anonymisation fragile, and the contract requires it. What is actually in the box The schedule of Spirit Airlines data is more specific than the summaries suggested. It lists 100 million emails across 80,000 accounts and 500 million Teams messages. Add 17,082,644 OneDrive files, 20,577,677 SharePoint files and 667,563 IT tickets. James Nani first reported the headline volumes for Bloomberg Law. The engineering side runs to 516 repositories and roughly 30 million lines of code. It also carries 372,585 commits, 43,170 pull requests, and the pipeline logs around them. The operational data is enormous. It covers 763,391 flights and 5,014,676 crew pairings. It holds 190,312,864 booking records and 7,510,221,520 transactions reaching back to May 2008. Disruption and reaccommodation add 3,000,347,472 rows. Then the corporate interior: board presentations, budget walkthroughs, deal pipelines, due diligence reports, investment committee papers, lender materials and merger fairness opinions. And the staff The schedule lists 175,658 employee records, with the system of record running from August 1986. It adds 3,426,618 payroll records and 148,018 employee tax forms. Then 1,092,000 time cards, training records, recruiting files and travel requests. Roughly 17,000 people lost their jobs when Spirit stopped flying on 2 May. Their correspondence, pay history and tax paperwork are line items in a schedule now. They signed employment contracts, not data licences. In a Chapter 11 estate the distinction does not arise. What Spirit kept, and what it may still sell The schedule marks the customer side not included throughout. The volumes are large: 97.5 million customer profiles, 50.2 million Free Spirit members, 740,000 card holders, 30,865,471 call recordings and 15,784,473 chat sessions. Regulatory records sit on the same side of the line. That includes 2,491,715 disability service requests, denied boarding data and complaints to the Department of Transportation. One clause is worth reading closely. Spirit may not sell the assets to anyone but Google, with a single exception: it may sell its customer data list, including individual traveller spend aggregated by year, to buyers in the hospitality or travel industries. So this sale did not shield the passengers. It separated them, and the estate kept the right to market them elsewhere. Axios reported the exclusions on Monday. The bidding, and what it revealed Google opened at $5mn. Mercor, an AI data company, countered at $5.2mn, then offered $7mn if it could take the raw data first and anonymise it itself, Business Insider reported. Google closed at $10mn. A bidder priced the unscrubbed version above its own bid for the scrubbed one. Mercor, which sought a $20bn valuation in July, remains the backup buyer at $7.5mn. Google had been in diligence for a while. The agreement references a confidentiality agreement with Spirit dated 18 June. Why an airline The value is not text to pretrain on. It is a chain of consequence. The archive connects a ticket to the emails about it, the commit that followed, the review thread and the operational result. Agents completing multi-step work need exactly that, and scraped text cannot supply it. Google has airline-specific reasons too. Google Cloud signed a five-year partnership with Ryanair on 12 August covering fleet operations and maintenance scheduling. It fits a pattern. Google is in talks to pay $1.5bn for a 35-person startup building coding environments, and China hit the same wall on training material this month. Meta tried collecting this kind of material from live staff and paused the programme after a revolt. An estate has nobody left to object. What would settle it Almost nobody can object now. The deadline for written objections passed at 4pm on 17 August, and the court required anyone attending to register by 11am on 18 August. Judge Sean H. Lane hears the Spirit Airlines data sale at 11am on 19 August, over Zoom. Two questions outlast it. Who audits a deidentification that the buyer designed, paid for and approved. And who buys the customer list, given the estate kept the right to sell it.

Spirit Airlines Is Dead, but Its Data Will Haunt Google's Servers for Generations to Come

Spirit Airlines has parked its budget flight business in the big airline hangar in the sky, but it will continue to live on in a Google data center. Google has emerged victorious in a bankruptcy auction to purchase a trove of data collected by the now-defunct airline and reportedly plans to use it to help train its AI models. Google's winning bid in the auction was priced at $10 million, outbidding Mercor, an AI training data giant. According to a notice published on the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York's docket, as the winning bidder, Google is now the proud owner of more than 100 million company emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, development metadata, software models and algorithms, as well as revenue, aircraft operations and employee productivity data. Most of the information Google picked up comes from the company's internal operations. Details like Spirit Airlines' 97.5 million passenger profiles and more than 50 million records on Spirit loyalty program members were not included in the purchase. So if you used to fly Spirit, rest easy knowing the company didn't totally sell you out (at least, not in this particular batch). To be sure, Google reportedly said that it will ensure data is "rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt," per Bloomberg. So what exactly does Google want with all this information? For AI, of course. "We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can help improve our products and AI models," Google told Bloomberg. Proprietary business data has become a big get for companies working on AI models. It's become a micro-market for failed startups to sell off their emails, Slack messages, and other communications to AI companies to squeeze a little more cash out of their dead businesses. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Mercor -- the same company involved in the bidding war for Spirit's trove -- was offering people money for materials from their previous jobs, hoping to extract industry-specific knowledge to train its AI. AI models definitely need some help if they're ever going to step into an executive role. Anthropic experimented by putting Claude in charge of a vending machine, only for it to lose money hand over fist. Andon Labs has been running an experiment that puts different AI models in charge of a cafe, and so far they've all managed to lose money at a baffling rate. Whether stuffing a model with data from the now-bankrupt Spirit Airlines will help with that is anyone's guess, but hey, data is data.

Google just bought a bunch of Spirit Airlines data for AI training

As the AI race continues to hunt for new data to use for AI training, Google has just purchased a huge dump of old data from the now-defunct Spirit Airlines to be "helpful" in training its AI models. Spirit Airlines, a low-cost airline in the US that was already dealing with financial struggles, abruptly shut down earlier this year in the midst of skyrocketing fuel costs during the height of the conflict in Iran. Now, bankruptcy auctions are underway around the remainder of the airline's assets, and Google was one of the buyers. Google wasn't interested in Spirit for the sake of aviation, but rather for all of the data left behind by the airline. Bloomberg Law reports that a $10 million bid from Google included data on operations and business, as well as software code, all of which will be used to train AI models. Google, in a brief statement, said: We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models. This data won't include personal information, though. Google says that the data will be "rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt" and it won't include data such as passenger profiles and loyalty program information. It does include hundreds of millions of Microsoft Teams chats as well as over 100 million emails, as well as information "related to revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity, and audits and fraud," a court explained. Bloomberg's report further mentions data on "marketing campaigns, human resources, strategy, and project management," pricing from over 7 billion competitor flights, around 7.5 billion passenger transaction records from nearly two decades of operations, and more than "30 million lines of code."

Google pays $10M to get its hands on Spirit Airlines' business data for AI training

Google pays $10M to get its hands on Spirit Airlines' business data for AI training Alphabet Inc.'s Google LLC has won an auction to acquire massive volumes of internal business data from the bankrupt airline operator Spirit Airlines Inc. for a hefty $10 million price. A report by Bloomberg says that Google outbid a number of competitors to acquire the data, including the artificial intelligence training data company Mercor.io Corp. A notice published on the website of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York reveals that Google is now the proud owner of a massive haul of information that will basically tell it everything about how Spirit ran its business. The haul reportedly spans 100 million company emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, software algorithms, development metadata and records pertaining to the airline's revenue, aircraft operations and employee productivity, Bloomberg reported. Much of the information that Google has acquired relates to the airline's internal operations, and it has not been given access to things like Spirit's 97.5 million passenger profiles or its 50 million loyalty program records. To reassure anyone who may have flown with Spirit, Google said it will make sure that all of the data it has acquired will be "rigorously scrubbed" of personally identifiable information by a third-party service provider, before it gets its hands on it. Google said that Spirit's data is a valuable asset that will help improve its AI products and models. In recent times, proprietary business data has become an in-demand resource for companies striving to develop more powerful AI models. In April, Gizmodo reported on the emergence of a nascent market for failed startups to sell off their emails, slack messages, operational data and so on to AI firms in order to squeeze whatever value remains out of their dead businesses. Mercor, which lost out to Google this time around, is one of the companies at the center of this new market. According to a Wall Street Journal report that same month, it has been going around offering professionals hard cash in return for materials from their former employers, hoping to extract industry-specific knowledge that can be used for AI training. AI companies are willing to pay big money for this kind of data because they need much more of it if they're ever going to achieve their dream of creating AI models that can outshine humans. The likes of Google, OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC have already helped themselves to most of the world's free information that's posted online, and some experts have warned that the world is rapidly running out of fresh data. It's a big concern, of course, because without fresh data, it's going to be much harder to improve on the AI systems we have now.

AI training data: Google to buy Spirit Airlines business data for $10 million

The acquired data includes Spirit Airlines' employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, and calendars, as well ⁠as marketing, productivity, and operations data. Alphabet's Google is acquiring internal business data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines for $10 million, saying it plans to use ⁠the data ⁠for product development and training its AI models. The acquired data includes Spirit Airlines' employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, and calendars, as well ⁠as marketing, productivity, and operations data. The data will ⁠be de-identified before the sale is complete, containing no customer information or personally identifiable information. A U.S. bankruptcy judge will consider approving the data sale at a Wednesday court hearing. Spirit also received a $7.5 million bid from Mercor, ⁠an AI data company. Spirit is selling off assets in bankruptcy after shutting down its business in May due to high debt and high fuel costs.

Google to Buy Bankrupt Spirit Airlines' Data for $10 Million - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)

Google is Paying $10 Million for Bankrupt Spirit Airlines' Old Emails and Spreadsheets: Here's Why Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google has reportedly agreed to buy internal business data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines for $10 million to use for product development and artificial intelligence model training. The Terms of the Sale "We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models," a Google spokesperson said. The company will not receive any personal information from the dataset, as a third party will scrub it before handing it over. The acquired data includes Spirit's employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets and calendars, as well as marketing, productivity and operations data, according to a Reuters News report. A U.S. bankruptcy judge is set to consider approving the sale at a hearing Wednesday. Spirit also received a competing $7.5 million bid from AI data company Mercor. Tech Anthony Scaramucci Says He Was 'Rolled in Broken Glass' and Put Through a 'Sausage Grinder' After Being Fired by Trump: His One Rule for Bouncing Back Anthony Scaramucci reflected on his 11-day White House stint and other setbacks, urging people to ignore the haters. 3 min read Read this article Spirit Airlines' Collapse Spirit shut down operations in May after high jet fuel costs, driven partly by the Iran war, derailed a planned bankruptcy restructuring, and a proposed federal rescue plan fell through. The airline has since sold off other assets, including its takeoff and landing slots at New York's LaGuardia Airport, which JetBlue Airways Corp. (NASDAQ:JBLU) won at auction last month for $58.5 million, beating out Frontier Group Holdings Inc.'s (NASDAQ:ULCC) Frontier Airlines' $57.5 million bid. A Second Bankruptcy That Ended In Liquidation Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025, a year after an earlier bankruptcy filing failed to turn around the airline's finances. The carrier tried to restructure by downsizing and focusing on stronger routes, but setbacks piled up, including a Pratt & Whitney engine recall that sidelined dozens of Airbus SE (OTC:EADSY) jets and a blocked JetBlue acquisition on antitrust grounds. Price Action: Alphabet's Class A stock closed 0.55% lower on Monday at $344 and fell 0.03% in extended trading, while its Class C stock closed 0.61% lower at $341.45 and fell 0.02% in after-hours. Benzinga edge rankings indicate Alphabet's Class A stock has a Momentum score in the 78th percentile and a Growth score in the 86th percentile. Markets Nike, Meta Platforms, INVO Fertility, EyePoint Pharmaceuticals, and Micron: Why These 5 Stocks Are on Investors' Radars Today Major U.S. indices ended lower on Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 0.51% to 53,459.78 3 min read Read this article Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Photo Courtesy: ZikG on Shutterstock.com Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Google wins Spirit Airlines data auction for AI training By Investing.com

Investing.com - Google won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' business data, agreeing to pay $10 million for emails, calendar information, chats, documents and spreadsheets, according to a bankruptcy court filing. The auction took place Friday for the deidentified data assets. Mercor.io Corporation submitted an alternate bid of $7.5 million for the same data. A hearing to approve the sale to Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is scheduled for August 19, 2026 before Judge Sean H. Lane in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Spirit Airlines ceased operations earlier in 2026 after failing to emerge from its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The airline filed for bankruptcy on August 29, 2025 in the Southern District of New York. Attorneys continue to handle the disposition of the carrier's remaining assets. The sale agreement requires all data to be deidentified before transfer to Google. The deidentification process removes or transforms data elements so information cannot be associated with or linked to individual consumers. Google commits to maintain the data in deidentified form and will not intentionally associate it with any person or household. Spirit Airlines retains the right to keep copies of the data solely for winding down its business or complying with legal requirements. The carrier may sell its customer data list, which includes individual traveler spending aggregated by year, to third parties in hospitality or travel industries. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.