Spirit Airlines, which declared bankruptcy and shut down on the 2nd of May this year, is selling all its assets in bankruptcy court auctions to pay off its roughly $8.1 billion in debt. According to Bloomberg Law, Google LLC beat out Mercor.io Corp. — an AI-focused recruitment firm — to the airline's data, with the AI tech giant offering $10 million, $2.5 million higher than the latter’s $7.5 million bid. Nevertheless, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York named Mercor.io Corp. as the backup buyer in case the Google deal falls through.
Google said it planned to use the massive amounts of data it purchased for training its AI LLMs, and the amount of data that the tech giant got its hands on is indeed a lot. Court records reveal that the Google purchase includes 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 7.2 billion records for competitors' flights, 7.5 billion passenger transaction records from 2008, and more than 175,000 employee records from 1986. Aside from this, the company will also get information on revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity records, audits and fraud, marketing campaigns, human resources records, project management, and pricing curve data, among others.
