Google pays $10 million for bankrupt airline data to train AI

Google's logo is seen in the company's office in Mountain View, California Paresh Dave/Reuters Google will pay US$10 million (R$51.7 million) for internal data from Spirit Airlines, an airline known for its low-cost tickets that ceased operations in May after facing high jet fuel prices and a heavy debt. According to a Forbes report, the material will be used to train the company's artificial intelligence models. The dataset includes hundreds of millions of employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, calendars, and operational information. All content will be anonymized before sale. The value of the data was enough to provoke a dispute between companies. Google beat data labeling startup Mercor, which had offered US$7.5 million (R$38.77 million). Corporate data has become especially valuable for training artificial intelligence systems because laboratories had already searched practically the entire public internet by the end of 2024. The use of Artificial Intelligence in the 2026 Elections and the fight against disinformation Companies that have closed their activities can leave behind large volumes of digital information, such as codes, email conversations, Slack messages and technology support calls, which help represent how a real work environment works. Startups like SimpleClosure and Sunset, which help companies in the process of closing their activities, also started to offer the purchase of this data for training AI systems.