Google buys Spirit Airlines' customer data for AI training

A US bankruptcy court auctioned off Spirit Airlines' data trove, with Google winning the bid at $10 million. The purchase includes hundreds of millions of emails and Microsoft Teams chats, plus billions of flight pricing and passenger records.

Why it matters: Bankruptcy proceedings are becoming a new pipeline for AI training data, letting companies acquire large troves of user communications and records cheaply with unclear consent from the original customers. It echoes Amazon's Twitch content policy and rare-book scanning as further evidence that data acquisition, not just compute, is a major front in the AI race.