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Spirit Airlines Data Sale

Google to buy Spirit Airlines’ business data for USD 10 million to train AI models

The news comes amid the bankrupt carrier selling off assets after shutting down its business in ⁠May due to high debt and high fuel costs

Alphabet’s Google is acquiring internal business data from bankrupt ‌American budget carrier Spirit Airlines for USD 10 million, with the goal of using the information for product development and training its AI models.

The acquired ⁠data includes Spirit Airlines’ employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, and calendars, as well as marketing, productivity, and operations data.

“The data will be de-identified before the sale is complete, containing no customer ‌information ⁠or personally identifiable information,” Google said.

The news comes amid the bankrupt carrier selling off assets after shutting down its business in ⁠May due to high debt and high fuel costs.

The acquisition of the Spirit’s internal data will help Google further to double down in its AI efforts. The tech giant, in the last week, launched its Gemini 3.7 Flash. The AI model has been tailored for software coding and automated business tasks.

Investors, however, will be closely watching for ‌Gemini 3.5 Pro, Google’s premium model, as the DeepMind AI unit faces the pressure of keeping up its innovation pace with rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.

Google had said in July Gemini 3.5 Pro was being tested with partners and would be coming “soon.”

The search engine giant is pitching the model as a lower-cost ⁠option for businesses building autonomous AI systems that can plan tasks, use software tools, and complete multi-step workflows with less human intervention.

Gemini 3.7 Flash has been released three weeks after the debut of Gemini 3.6 Flash. The latest AI model has shown improved performance on coding tasks, including debugging, issue resolution, and production-ready code generation, according to a Google blog post.

To drive the tool’s adoption, Google is offering Gemini 3.7 Flash at an introductory rate of 75 cents per million input tokens and USD 3.75 per million output tokens through the end of the year, half the original cost of Gemini 3.6 ‌Flash.

The ⁠model is also being rolled out to “Gemini Spark,” Google’s subscription-based AI agent service available to Google AI Pro and Ultra customers in more than 160 countries.

Recognising the rapid advancements made by OpenAI and Anthropic in the AI innovation space, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has recently urged his staff to fully commit to the company’s Gemini model in order to close the gap and surpass the competing models.

The tech giant has also announced a sweeping leadership overhaul of its Google DeepMind AI division in which its chief, Demis Hassabis, stepped ⁠aside in favor of his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. At the same time, the two original technical co-leads of Gemini quit to co-found a startup.

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