Old data from defunct businesses are goldmines for data brokers: People are making a fortune
One man’s digital trash is an LLM’s treasure.There is a gold rush in the growing business of AI data brokers.
People are purchasing data — ranging from a defunct small business’s Slack messages or employee presentations to years of shop-floor records from former manufacturers — and then selling or licensing it to frontier AI labs to train their large language models.These data brokers aren’t rag-and-bone men.They’re companies like Micro1 and Mercor that have launched in just the last two years and are already valued in the billions. And they’re just getting started. Micro1 CEO Ali Ansari estimates that annual spending on data by AI labs, enterprises and robotics companies has grown from roughly $2 billion a few years ago to nearly $50 billion today — and he predicts that spending could approach $1 trillion annually within the next few years.“We believe this market is going to be one of the largest markets in the world.
It’s also going to be one of the largest job sectors,” Ansari told The Post.The industry is one of a host of new businesses springing up around AI.Brokers typically take a cut of sales — and successful ones are bragging that they can make millions in a single week.“It can be quite lucrative,” Ansari said, adding that he has heard the practice has helped some businesses avoid bankruptcy.
Companies are also reaching out to him in hopes of getting paid for their data.Around 200 businesses a day sign up to explore licensing their data to Micro1, though the smallest ones rarely make it through the process because they simply don’t produce data with enough volume or complexity to make it worth buying.
Most businesses Micro1 works with have between 30 and 150 employees, Ansari said, and payments can range from a couple hundred thousand dollars to a few million, depending on the amount and value of the data.That can potentially represent a substantial share of a small company’s annual revenue.According to Ansari, the...