구글, 파산 항공사 스피릿 데이터를 경매에서 1,000만 달러에 낙찰받다

AI and ml Google buys crashed airline Spirit’s data at auction, because AI $10 million buys over 100 million emails, 30 million recorded phone calls, reams of stuff from Teams, Oracle, and SAP Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor APAC Editor Published tue 18 Aug 2026 // 07:43 UTC Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit. Spirit hit financial turbulence when COVID-19 blew in during 2020 and started making losses. Its balance sheet never climbed back to a safe altitude and in May 2026 the airline grounded itself permanently. The low-cost carrier entered liquidation to wind itself up and is now auctioning assets to raise cash and settle at least some of its debts. REG AD A court document [PDF] filed last week reveals that one of the assets up for sale is a huge trove of deidentified data, which Google bid for and won for just $10 million. REG AD For that sum, Google bought itself 100 million emails and 500 million items from Microsoft Teams, 17 million OneDrive files and 20.5 million items from SharePoint. The search giant also now owns over 30 million recorded customer service calls, and more than 15 million customer service chat records. MORE CONTEXT 60 years since humanity touched the surface of another planet Oracle and OpenAI's Texas Stargate datacenter expansion reportedly on the skids Don’t blame AI yet for poor jobs numbers, analysts say US state laws push age checks into the operating system 600,000 ServiceNow tickets are another element of the collection, along with 13.7 million active emails addresses from Oracle’s Responsys marketing application, and details of 11 million sales of in-flight Wi-Fi services. There’s also operational data in the trove, describing over 763,000 flights, five million crew pairings, more than 1.2 million fuel slips, and records describing purchases of 787,452 parts. Google has reportedly said it bought the data to improve its AI services. The underbidder was Mercor, a company that provides data to train AI models. So clearly Spirit’s data is of value to AI companies. Indeed, The Register recently reported how AI experts increasingly believe large language models are blunt instruments, and that smaller models trained on specific fields of knowledge are more useful in some applications. Google might have itself the basis for an aviation ops model, or with all sorts of quotidian financial records that could be useful for another AI. If you’ve flown Spirit and worry that Google will soon know about a testy conversation you had with the airline’s call center, you’re being told not to worry. The court filing says the data was deidentified before being put on sale and Google has promised to scrub any PII it finds in the trove. The Register awaits evidence of the inevitable errors that mean some personal info appears as the result of a future prompt, or search. REG AD Fasten your seat belts! ® google training data ai training aviation ai and ml