Google just spent $10 million in an auction for Spirit Airlines data – 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, and 30 million lines of code will be used to improve AI models and products

Spirit Airlines collapsed in May this year, but its data is set for a new lease of life after Google acquired it in an auction.

The tech giant recently outbid AI company Mercor to acquire the de-identified data, according to court documents. Google bid $10 million, versus Mercor's $7.5 million, though reports note the bidding started around the $5 million mark.

A third bidder also took part but was not named.

A spokesperson for Google told ITPro the aim behind acquiring the defunct airline’s data lies in its potential use for AI training and product refinement.

"We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models,” the spokesperson said.

That same sentiment was highlighted by a spokesperson for Mercor, per reports from Business Insider.

"Companies are sitting on decades of records that show how real work gets done, and that data is now some of the most valuable material for training and evaluating AI," the spokesperson said.

"We partner with leading companies to license their operational data to the labs building the next generation of models. Spirit was that same process applied to a bankruptcy estate."

What Google bought

The data bought by Google includes all productivity and collaboration data, which the filing notes includes everything from emails to chats, spreadsheets to calendars, as well as "core business systems and business applications data".

This includes data on employee behavior and productivity, aircraft operations, and inventory, among other topics. Beyond that, Google has purchased workflow and process data from departments such as HR and marketing.

In total, Google is picking up 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of code – but not records of loyalty program members or other customer data.

Indeed, the data set does not include any consumer data or personal data, the filing noted, or any other information that could fall under data protection laws. The buyer was required to agree to not attempt to re-identify the data and link it to any person.

The buyer is allowed to transfer the data set to third parties, however.

"We will not receive any personal information from this dataset," the Google spokesperson added. "Any data we receive will be rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt."

Alongside the data, Google's $10 million also buys it all of Spirit's internally developed software and applications, including all the source code, plugins, data files, libraries, APIs and documentation.

The battle for data

The battle for the business data reveals how desperate AI developers are for fresh material to feed AI, in particular for training models, though Google didn't specifically say that was the purpose of the data set.

Anthropic has raised eyebrows via a campaign of buying up pre-2022 books to scan for training data, while Google was reportedly trying to buy code from Google Play Store app developers.

SimpleClosure helps failed startups sell their old code, chats, and emails to AI companies, and Meta had to pause plans to track its own employees for AI training purposes amid internal backlash.

All of this is to avoid issues like data exhaustion or hitting a data wall, in which they lack enough good quality data to build bigger models, and to avoid model collapse, when training data isn't of good enough quality — or is full of AI generated content.

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