Google buys Spirit Airlines’ business data for $10M to train AI
Google has won the bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines’ internal business data with a bid of $10 million. The notice of auction results, filed on 14 August in the Chapter 11 case of Spirit Aviation Holdings, names Google LLC as the successful bidder and Mercor.io Corporation as the alternate at $7.5 million.
The auction itself ran virtually on Friday 14 August, according to that filing. Getting to $10 million took several rounds. Business Insider reported that Google opened at $5 million and Mercor countered at $5.2 million, then offered $7 million on the condition that it could take the raw data first and anonymise it itself.
| Bidder | Amount | Stage |
|---|---|---|
| $5 million | Opening bid | |
| Mercor | $5.2 million | Counter |
| Mercor | $7 million | Conditional on taking raw data first |
| Mercor | $7.5 million | Alternate bid recorded in the filing |
| $10 million | Successful bid |
What Google bought is the record of how an airline actually ran. SiliconANGLE, citing Bloomberg, put the haul at roughly 100 million company emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats and 30 million lines of code, plus development metadata and records covering revenue, aircraft operations and employee productivity. Skift’s reading of the filing adds about 3.4 million payroll records, 80,000 email accounts and employee data going back to 1986, along with Spirit’s pricing models, booking curves, refund histories and Wi-Fi sales records.
The passenger side is carved out. Google told Business Insider it isn’t buying customer or credit card information, and Skift reports the exclusions cover 97.5 million passengers, 52.4 million loyalty members and 740,000 co-branded cardholders.
We are buying the company’s internal data and custom software, but we are not buying their customer or credit card information.
Google spokesperson, via Business Insider
That promise sits in contract language rather than in a press statement, which matters more than it sounds. Before anything moves, Spirit has to hand the data to a deidentification agent, a third party that Google approves or designates, which strips out elements that could be linked back to a person. Google covers the cost of that work, and the agreement says those costs don’t reduce the purchase price. So $10 million is the floor.
It’s a firmer commitment than the usual assurance, though it doesn’t touch the awkward part. Once a model has trained on scrubbed records, deleting the source doesn’t unlearn them.
Why a dead airline’s email is worth $10 million
Mercor, the underbidder, is one of the firms building the market this sale belongs to. Its spokesperson told Business Insider that the Spirit auction was its usual licensing process applied to a bankruptcy estate.
Companies are sitting on decades of records that show how real work gets done, and that data is now some of the most valuable material for training and evaluating AI.
Mercor spokesperson, via Business Insider
The buying isn’t confined to dead companies. Business Insider notes that Micro1 pays 50 midsize firms between $100,000 and $2 million for anonymised data, and that Meta announced an initiative to track employee keystrokes and mouse movements to improve how well its AI uses computers, then suspended it after an internal data exposure and a strong backlash from employees. Harvesting live work as training material is a pattern that keeps recurring.
Spirit shut down earlier this year, and 9to5Google reports Google framed the purchase narrowly: part of an enterprise dataset that can be helpful in improving its products and AI models. That’s a small claim for a big number, which is the tell. Nobody spends eight figures on a defunct carrier’s Teams history unless the operational detail inside it is scarce elsewhere.
The sale still needs a judge
The filing schedules the approval hearing for 11:00 a.m. on 19 August 2026 in the Southern District of New York. If Google fails to close, the filing says Mercor’s $7.5 million bid stands as the fallback. The figure worth watching isn’t the $10 million, though. It’s whether anyone shows up to object when a bankruptcy estate sells its email archive to an AI lab.
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