Google just bought a bankrupt airline's internal data for less than the price of a single business-class ticket to Tokyo.
Spirit Airlines shut down in May after piling up $8.1 billion in debt, and is now auctioning off its assets in bankruptcy court. Google beat out AI recruiting firm Mercor.io for a data package, offering $10 million to Mercor's $7.5 million bid. The haul includes 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 7.2 billion competitor flight-pricing records, 7.5 billion passenger transaction records dating back to 2008, and more than 175,000 employee records from 1986. Google says it plans to use the data to train its AI language models; a court-appointed third party will strip out personally identifiable information before Google receives anything.
This is what AI data sourcing looks like once the open internet stops yielding anything new: companies quietly buying up decades of internal corporate paperwork nobody else can access. It echoes recent reports of AI firms buying out-of-print books for the same reason. Whether Google turns this into aviation-specific tools, as some observers have speculated, is a guess, not something Google has said. Google itself has only described the data as training material for general-purpose AI models.
Spirit's roughly 175,000 former employees and millions of passengers get one small mercy: their names never make it into the files Google actually receives.