That two-order-of-magnitude spread—$5 million to $250 million—tells you the training-data market has stratified fast, per qz.com. Commodity annotation and scraped-web licensing sit at the low end, while exclusive access to proprietary corpora, multimodal archives, or long-term enterprise data partnerships command the nine-figure sums frontier labs are now willing to pay.
For sellers, the lesson is clear: uniqueness and exclusivity are what move a deal from the $5M bucket into the $250M bucket, not raw volume.
The price of AI training data, from $5M to $250M
— qz.com
