Spirit: Google buys massive amounts of data from insolvent airlines for AI

Google has acquired huge amounts of emails and other data such as flight booking details and price calculations from US airline Spirit Airlines, which went bankrupt a few months ago. The information should now be used to train AI systems.

$10 million for airline digital estate

The digital remains of the US airline Spirit are worth a whopping 10 million US dollars (around 9 million euros) to the Internet company Google. According to a recently published court document, the company acquired data from the airline on a large scale in order to use it for AI training. The extent of the data treasure is apparently enormous.

Google receives around 100 million emails, 500 million chat messages from Microsoft Teams, 17 million OneDrive files and 20.5 million content from Microsoft SharePoint, reports, among others The Register. Furthermore, Google now has over 30 million audio recordings of customer service conversations and more than 15 million chat logs from customer queries.

Operating data is also part of the data treasure

There are also 600,000 support tickets and 13.7 million email addresses from a marketing solution used by Spirit and 11 million records relating to bookings for in-flight internet access. The data package also goes beyond the information resulting from internal communication and dealing with passengers. Google receives data on 763,000 flights, five million crew lists, more than 1.2 million fuel purchases and Spirit Airlines’ purchase of almost 800,000 spare parts. After anonymization, the data will apparently be used for AI training. This is probably not the only case in which data from failed companies is used for AI applications.

Google could use the data, among other things, to create applications in the field of artificial intelligence that could be useful for airline operations and customer service. In addition to Google, another bidder also tried to acquire the Spirit data. However, the data retailer Mercor, which sells such data sets for AI training, failed with its bid of around seven million US dollars (around 6 million euros), while Google won the contract.