Google is buying Spirit Airlines' old data for $10 million to improve its AI

Google won a $10 million bid to buy Spirit Airlines’ internal corporate data and custom software out of bankruptcy, saying the data could help improve its AI products and models. The purchase excludes customer and credit card information. The deal underscores the escalating competition among AI firms for non-public training data as open-web sources become more exhausted. Rival AI startup Mercor bid up to $7.5 million and had previously challenged Google in the auction, highlighting the strategic value of proprietary enterprise data for training customer-service bots and debugging tools. The article points to broader industry behavior, including Meta’s earlier effort to track employee activity for AI training purposes, showing how far companies are going to secure data advantage. Market-wise, the news is mildly positive for Alphabet as it reinforces its commitment to AI infrastructure and model quality, though the immediate financial impact is immaterial.