Google Paid $10 Million for Spirit Airlines' Internal Data. The Corporate Data Gold Rush Is On

Google paid $10 million in August for the internal data of bankrupt Spirit Airlines — 31 years of corporate workflows that have suddenly become a hot commodity in the AI training boom. The deal put a public price tag on a marketplace that has exploded over the past few months, with vendors reportedly netting $2 million a week.

Micro1, an AI data annotation firm, submitted a $12 million bid for Spirit's data and lost. Mercor, another annotation firm, bid $7.5 million and also lost, according to the source report.

How did this market start?

Over the summer, Micro1 approached Dan Novaes, CEO of consumer technology company Mode.Inc, hoping to license its internal data — company-wide memos, Slack exchanges — as training data for LLM developers. Novaes turned it down because the deal called for raw data, with no ability for Mode.Inc to audit the anonymization or strip proprietary information. Micro1 runs its own de-identification process for enterprise datasets.

"We were like, 'We're interested, but can we audit that before it actually gets licensed?' And the answer was no. The answer is still no for all other companies effectively, as far as I know," Novaes said.

He then spun up a rival venture, BizBuyData.com, positioned as a data vendor that prioritizes protection. "There's an opportunity here to give businesses a bit more control and also a reassurance of the de-identification process, the actual audit of any sensitive documents," Novaes said.

Why do frontier labs want internal company data?

OpenAI and Anthropic want AI agents fluent in corporate vernacular, capable of assisting white-collar workers. Dan Wang, a professor at Columbia Business School, said internal datasets are valuable because they capture protocols that actually worked.

"What these data give insight into are the kind of patterns of communication, collaboration, and coordination that made a company successful. Broader than that, what it shows in many ways is how to reason across the system," Wang said.

A new ecosystem of middlemen — DataVendor AI, Miro Advisory and others — now brokers the digital histories of tech startups, HVAC businesses, plumbers, coffee shops and accounting firms. "I've never seen anything like it. It's grown incredibly fast," said Mike Lisovetsky, co-founder of Miro Advisory.

Demand has scaled fast. "What started out as maybe one or two frontier labs experimenting with this over the summer has snowballed into, basically, every frontier lab, and then the Magnificent Seven and the Fortune 50," Novaes said.

What does the data sell for?

Pricing varies by dataset. Companies earn more when more employees generate more actionable data points over longer periods. That explains Google's $10 million premium for Spirit, which Lisovetsky calls a juggernaut deal within the sector.

"In systems you could think of as Slack, email, CRM… the more that they interact with each other and the more of them that you have with more users that use it, the better," Lisovetsky said.

"Basically, you're putting in no more than 10 hours of work to unlock six or seven figures for your business, at best," Novaes said.

The market extends beyond transcripts. DataMedsAI, a healthcare technology company specializing in patient data and prescription management, recently acquired a laboratory of 30,000 ovarian primary cancer tumors — what CEO Gerald Commissioning calls "the world's biggest." The buyer of that data "can use their AI to create new drugs" targeting cancer, Commissioning said.

Who pays the privacy price?

Critics warn that struggling companies may sell data with little regard for employees' personally identifiable information. "I would be curious how it feels for past employees in companies that failed to convert equity into value for their staff, to have tech communication of their hard work sold for a pittance and with disregard of their privacy," said Alix Dunn, founder and CEO of tech policy think tank The Maybe.

Google announced a plan on Wednesday to anonymize Spirit Airlines' data. Vendors like Miro Advisory run de-identification protocols before resale, swapping real names for fake identities — "anywhere where it says Mike or Michael or Mikey, there's a fake identity that's made to replace it — like Bob or Robert," Lisovetsky said.

Wang expects regulatory attention. "This is a space that defies regulation right now," he said, adding that vendors must "behave in this regulatory gray space" while immunizing themselves from legal threat. He also doubts the middlemen will last: "I don't expect there to be some dominant intermediary that is channeling private corporate data from one source to a set of frontier labs."