Google is willing to pay $10 million to a bankrupt airline for a lot of old emails and Microsoft Teams chats with over 100,000 employee records in system since 1980’s. Spirit Airlines is the interested
buyer for Google and while that sum is fraction of what the company spends in a week, what is really intriguing is the data it wants to acquire and what it plans to do with content like employee chats on Microsoft Teams, their records and much more.
We say data is the new oil, and Google is somehow giving us a value of old-timer data that even the airline might be ready to junk.
What Does Google Get For $10 Million From The Airline
Here are the contents that Spirit Airline will give to Google if the reported deal goes through
- 100 million company emails
- 500 million Microsoft Teams messages
- 30 million lines of code
- 175,000+ employee records
Time To Auction Data
Airline going bankrupt leaves a lot of assets on the auction table and Spirit Airlines is going to have a lot of data that Google seems to consider to be more valuable than the parts of the plane. Google made the first bid for all this data of $5 million which was then surpassed by AI data firm Mercor for $5.2 million which was then followed by a bid of $7 million.
But Google had the last laugh and decided to up the stakes with a $10 million that pretty much closes the round. Mercor still lingers in the background in case the tech giant decides to back out of the deal.
More Data For AI
Data scraping has become the need of the hour for AI companies and most of the stuff available openly on the internet have been taken. Which leaves them to spend some money and actually make use of valuable data to not only make AI train but also make it smarter and more dynamic in its working.
What Google gets is record of flight transactions over 7 billion, and a lot of other employee messages and request records pulled up through the systems of the airlines that date all the way back to 2008.
Google assures that personal information available through the dataset will be full scrubbed and that will include profiles of over 97 million passengers with the airlines as well as their loyalty points records.
Data profiles are as valuable as the data itself but Google and other tech companies are looking for unique ways to scape data. Some companies are paying people to wear head-on cameras and use that data to train their AI for humanoid robots to take over in the future. Some are simply using their employee behaviour and key strokes on their systems to analyse data patterns.
It sure is an ugly world out there, but going for a bankrupt airline will probably the least of worries for most of us.
