Google Wins $10 Million Spirit Data Auction for 100 Million Emails to Train AI
Updated
Updated · TechSpot · Aug 18
Google Wins $10 Million Spirit Data Auction for 100 Million Emails to Train AI
3 articles · Updated · TechSpot · Aug 18
Summary
$10 million put Google atop Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy auction for a vast internal archive that includes about 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, pending a federal judge's approval Wednesday.
The purchase also covers 17 million OneDrive files, more than 20 million SharePoint items and 516 code repositories with roughly 30 million lines of software, plus flight, pricing, crew and support records.
Google says it will use the material to improve products and train AI systems on how work gets done inside a company—capturing decisions, coordination and error-fixing that public web data usually misses.
Customer and credit-card data are excluded, and a third party must strip personally identifiable information before transfer, though sanitizing decades of workplace communications could still leave re-identification risks.
Spirit shut down earlier this year after a second Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the sale underscores a growing market for failed companies' internal data as AI firms hunt for new training material.