Google Buys All of Spirit Airlines’ Data to Feed Its AI Models

Google has agreed to pay $10 million for a massive trove of anonymized Spirit Airlines data following the carrier’s shutdown, including internal communications, spreadsheets, booking and frequent-flyer records, transactions, and employee information. Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worked there? Then your information will soon be feeding Google’s artificial intelligence model. The discount airline halted all operations in May, and it’s been selling off its remaining assets through the bankruptcy process ever since. While most of that is planes, equipment, and real estate, there’s other things that are valuable, too.

It was disclosed late Monday that the company agreed to sell its data to Google for $10 million. That includes emails and internal communications, spreadsheets, transactions with the public including bookings and frequent flyer information as well as human resources information on its employees. The data has been stripped of anything that would allow individuals to be identified, according to the court filing. But it is still a massive amount of useful intelligence.