Google has acquired a portion of the business data from American airline Spirit Airlines for $10 million to enhance its products and artificial intelligence models. This acquisition comes as the airline ceases operations this year.
Google Acquires Data from Spirit Airlines for AI Development
Google’s offer surpasses that of Mercor.io, which was valued at $7.5 million, to gain access to a wealth of information from Spirit Airlines. The company states that it has acquired « part of a dataset from Spirit Airlines » that could enhance its products and artificial intelligence models.
The dataset includes over 100 million emails and hundreds of millions of Microsoft Teams conversations, containing information on revenue, operations, productivity, audits, and fraud. It also consists of more than 30 million lines of code, as well as pricing data for 7 billion competing flights and 7.5 billion passenger transactions accumulated over twenty years.
Google asserts that the data does not contain any personal information about passengers, passenger profiles, or data from loyalty programs. The company claims that the dataset has been “thoroughly cleaned of any identifiable information before receipt”.
This exclusion aims to separate the operational and commercial data purchased by Google from files directly related to travelers, while the Teams conversations and emails provide insight into Spirit Airlines’ internal operations. Third-party cleaning occurs prior to the dataset delivery, including for items related to audits or fraud detection mechanisms.
Spirit Airlines thus becomes the first American airline to fully cease operations in 25 years, amidst rising fuel prices and ongoing conflict with Iran. Its closure paves the way for the sale of its social assets, part of which Google is now utilizing to train its AI systems.
