Spirit Airlines may have gone bankrupt, but its data lives on. Google has reportedly purchased Spirit's trove of operational and customer data as part of the carrier's bankruptcy wind-down, scooping up years of booking patterns, pricing behavior, and customer service logs to help train its AI systems. Almost ironically, the budget airline famous for charging extra for nearly everything—carry-ons, seat selection, printing a boarding pass at the counter—is now cashing in on the one thing it never charged for: the data it collected while watching customers try to avoid those fees.

Here is what moved the needle in tech.

Meta braces for "astronomical" trial in California

Opening arguments begin Tuesday in a federal trial in which a coalition of 29 state attorneys general, co-led by California AG Rob Bonta, accuses Meta of designing Instagram and Facebook to be addictive to children and of violating child-privacy laws. New Mexico AG Raúl Torrez—who recently won a separate case against Meta in his state that resulted in nearly $1 billion in damages—told CNBC the outcome of the current case "could be astronomical."

Meta said in a court filing that the states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties, though the states put the figure closer to $200 billion. Unlike the wave of prior state-level suits Meta has weathered, this trial is unfolding in the company's own backyard, and a loss could force Meta to rework the recommendation systems that are central to how Instagram and Facebook keep users engaged and how those platforms support ad revenue. — Lily Mae Lazarus

Big Tech's AI bill is bigger than the balance sheet shows

A new Wall Street Journal analysis found that nine major tech companies, including Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle, are carrying roughly $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments tied mostly to AI, on top of what they report in quarterly capital expenditures.

Much of that spending runs through special purpose vehicles. These financing structures let hyperscalers lease data centers built by separate entities, so the debt shows up on someone else's books instead of their own, even as they lock in the compute. A separate Nikkei analysis of five of those companies found their combined off-balance-sheet debt has already swelled nearly eightfold in four years to $1.65 trillion, exceeding what they report on their actual balance sheets.

The scale matters because it shows how AI infrastructure is being financed far beyond the numbers most investors see in quarterly reports, with the obligations extending into lenders, private credit funds, and asset managers that helped underwrite the leases. — Lily Mae Lazarus

OpenAI locks up its biggest data center yet in Ohio

OpenAI has signed a 10-gigawatt data-center lease in Ohio with SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, in a project partly backstopped by Nvidia. It is expected to become one of the largest AI hubs ever built.

Nvidia's involvement has been a moving target: the chipmaker was reportedly negotiating a $250 billion financing guarantee for the project before scaling that back to under $120 billion after investors flagged concerns about how much risk Nvidia itself was taking on.

The deal underscores how the AI buildout is moving from model development to the physical infrastructure needed to run it, with OpenAI securing enormous power capacity and Nvidia taking on a broader role in the financing stack for one of its biggest customers. — Lily Mae Lazarus

In brief

• Reddit is testing narrated audio and video versions of posts across select English-language communities, letting users "listen to" Reddit while multitasking.
• Alibaba launched a new laptop-ready Qwen model and open-sourced the weights of its flagship Qwen3.8-Max.
• YouTube will count a view the instant a standard video starts playing, starting August 24, matching how it already counts Shorts—a change that will inflate view counts without affecting creator pay.
• Uber is partnering with drone company Zipline and making a strategic investment to bring drone delivery to Uber Eats nationwide.
• Serve Robotics is adding Grubhub to its sidewalk robot delivery network in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, alongside new market launches.
• Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation—roughly half its worth a year ago—after Nvidia licensed its chip technology and hired away founder Jonathan Ross.

Source: Fortune