Google buys crashed airline Spirit’s data at auction, because AI
Google has acquired some data of failed US airline Spirit.
Spirit hit financial turbulence when COVID-19 blew in during 2020 and started making losses. Its balance sheet never climbed back to a safe altitude and in May 2026 the airline grounded itself permanently.
The low-cost carrier entered liquidation to wind itself up and is now auctioning assets to raise cash and settle at least some of its debts.
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A court document \[PDF\] filed last week reveals that one of the assets up for sale is a huge trove of deidentified data, which Google bid for and won for just $10 million - pending judicial approval.
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For that sum, Google bought itself 100 million emails and 500 million items from Microsoft Teams, 17 million OneDrive files and 20.5 million items from SharePoint. The search giant also now owns over 30 million recorded customer service calls, and more than 15 million customer service chat records.
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600,000 ServiceNow tickets are another element of the collection, along with 13.7 million active emails addresses from Oracle’s Responsys marketing application, and details of 11 million sales of in-flight Wi-Fi services.
There’s also operational data in the trove, describing over 763,000 flights, five million crew pairings, more than 1.2 million fuel slips, and records describing purchases of 787,452 parts.
Google has reportedly said it bought the data to improve its AI services. The underbidder was Mercor, a company that provides data to train AI models. So clearly Spirit’s data is of value to AI companies.
Indeed, The Register recently reported how AI experts increasingly believe large language models are blunt instruments, and that smaller models trained on specific fields of knowledge are more useful in some applications.
Google might have itself the basis for an aviation ops model, or just with all sorts of quotidian financial records that could be useful for another AI.
If you’ve flown Spirit and worry that Google will soon know about your flight history or a testy conversation you had with the airline’s call center, you’re being told not to worry. The court filing says the data was deidentified before being put on sale and Google has promised to scrub any PII it finds in the trove.
The Register awaits evidence of the inevitable SNAFUs that mean some personal info appears as the result of a future prompt, or search.
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