By Ben Schoon
Publication Date: 2026-08-17 17:45:00
As the AI race continues to hunt for new data to use for AI training, Google has just purchased a huge dump of old data from the now-defunct Spirit Airlines to be “helpful” in training its AI models.
Spirit Airlines, a low-cost airline in the US that was already dealing with financial struggles, abruptly shut down earlier this year in the midst of skyrocketing fuel costs during the height of the conflict in Iran. Now, bankruptcy auctions are underway around the remainder of the airline’s assets, and Google was one of the buyers.
Google wasn’t interested in Spirit for the sake of aviation, but rather for all of the data left behind by the airline.
Bloomberg Law reports that a $10 million bid from Google included data on operations and business, as well as software code, all of which will be used to train AI models. Google, in a brief statement, said:
We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from…
