Google agreed to pay $10 million in a bankruptcy auction for a large trove of internal data from defunct carrier Spirit Airlines, beating a $7.5 million backup bid from AI recruiting firm Mercor. The dataset includes hundreds of millions of emails, Microsoft Teams chats, flight pricing records, and anonymized passenger information that Google plans to use for product development and AI model training. All records must be anonymized by a third party before transfer, and Google is barred from attempting to de-anonymize them.
