Alphabet Inc.’s Google LLC has won an auction to acquire massive volumes of internal business data from the bankrupt airline operator Spirit Airlines Inc. for a hefty $10 million price.

A report by Bloomberg says that Google outbid a number of competitors to acquire the data, including the artificial intelligence training data company Mercor.io Corp. A notice published on the website of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York reveals that Google is now the proud owner of a massive haul of information that will basically tell it everything about how Spirit ran its business.

The haul reportedly spans 100 million company emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, software algorithms, development metadata and records pertaining to the airline’s revenue, aircraft operations and employee productivity, Bloomberg reported.

Much of the information that Google has acquired relates to the airline’s internal operations, and it has not been given access to things such as Spirit’s 97.5 million passenger profiles or its 50 million loyalty program records. To reassure anyone who may have flown with Spirit, Google said it will make sure that all of the data it has acquired will be “rigorously scrubbed” of personally identifiable information by a third-party service provider, before it gets its hands on it.

Google said that Spirit’s data is a valuable asset that will help improve its AI products and models.

In recent times, proprietary business data has become an in-demand resource for companies striving to develop more powerful AI models. In April, Gizmodo reported on the emergence of a nascent market for failed startups to sell off their emails, slack messages, operational data and so on to AI firms in order to squeeze whatever value remains out of their dead businesses.

Mercor, which lost out to Google this time around, is one of the companies at the center of this new market. According to a Wall Street Journal report that same month, it has been going around offering professionals hard cash in return for materials from their former employers, hoping to extract industry-specific knowledge that can be used for AI training.

AI companies are willing to pay big money for this kind of data because they need much more of it if they’re ever going to achieve their dream of creating AI models that can outshine humans. The likes of Google, OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC have already helped themselves to most of the world’s free information that’s posted online, and some experts have warned that the world is rapidly running out of fresh data. It’s a big concern, of course, because without fresh data, it’s going to be much harder to improve on the AI systems we have now.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research said Spirit Airlines’ data is especially valuable for AI companies because model makers have hardly any information at all about how specific enterprises operate, as none of them are willing to sell it. “Bankruptcies are really the only opportunity for model makers to get hold of this kind of data, and that’s why Google was willing to part with $10 million in this auction,” the analyst said. “Spirit’s data gives it a real good look at the inner workings of an airline, and this will enable it to understand the processes and interaction that take place in this kind of business. It’ll then be able to train new AI systems based on this information.”

However, Mueller said Google is taking a minor risk because it’s not clear exactly how useful the insights from a failed airline will really be — if anything, the data may be more useful in teaching it what not to do, rather than the correct way to run an airline. For consumers meanwhile, the transaction might also serve as a warning. “The lesson learnt is that data is an asset and it can be monetized when needed, as is the case with Spirit, which needs to pay its creditors,” Mueller said. “This is something consumers need to be aware of.”

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