Google has won a bankruptcy auction for a large collection of Spirit Airlines' internal business data, bidding $10 million and outpacing AI hiring platform Mercor, which submitted the second-highest bid of $7.5 million. Google's initial bid was $5 million before Mercor entered the bidding.
According to court filings reported by Bloomberg Law, the dataset includes 100 million emails across 80,000 accounts, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 17,082,644 OneDrive files, 20,577,677 SharePoint files, and 667,563 IT tickets. Operational data covers more than 763,000 flights, five million crew pairings, over 1.2 million fuel slips, and records describing the purchase of 787,452 parts.
A key provision of the sale agreement requires all data records to be de-identified by a third party before being transferred to Google, removing personally identifiable information. Google is barred from attempting to de-anonymize the data in the future. Google will select the firm responsible for the scrubbing and pay for the services, with those costs not reducing the $10 million purchase price.
Google said the information could help improve its products and AI models, reflecting growing demand among technology companies for large datasets drawn from real-world business operations. Passenger profiles, loyalty programme information, customer data, and credit card information are explicitly excluded from the acquisition.
The transaction remains subject to approval by a US bankruptcy judge, with a court hearing scheduled for 19 August in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Spirit Airlines declared bankruptcy and ceased all operations in May 2026 after twice filing for Chapter 11 protection in under two years.
