Google bids $10 million for the data of a bankrupt airline

Google bids $10 million for the business data archive of Spirit Airlines. The airline sells the archive in its bankruptcy proceedings. The archive holds about 100 million employee emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages and 30 million lines of source code. Google wants the data to train its AI models. The data can show how workers talk and work on problems.

What is new

First chatbots learned from text on the internet. At this time, AI firms make agents that do business tasks. They want records of how companies work. An agent can learn the steps that workers did on a problem, then use them on a different problem.

The numbers

The archive also has price curves, flight operations data and crew schedules. $10 million is large in a bankruptcy but small for Google. A full archive can cost less than licenses for the same data.

What is not known

The source does not say if a court agreed to the sale. It does not say the effect of the sale on the private messages of workers.

Insight: A bankrupt firm can become a source of training data

Data centers are a large subject in the US midterm elections. Jim Himes says they will become very important infrastructure. The archive of Spirit Airlines gets far less public interest. This reads as a hidden race for records of work, where a firm in bankruptcy has small control. Lawyer Alex Kimata thinks more such deals will follow. Leaders must find the effect of a bankruptcy of a partner on shared data.