The deal covers 100 million emails and years of flight, pricing and crew data — but Google, not an independent party, picks who scrubs it first.
Google LLC has won a bankruptcy auction for a large collection of business data and software from defunct carrier Spirit Aviation Holdings, agreeing to pay $10 million for records the company says will help train its AI models, according to a court filing.
The winning bid, selected at an Aug. 14 auction and detailed in a notice filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, covers roughly 100 million emails across 80,000 accounts, about 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and operational data spanning pricing, revenue, aircraft operations and audits. It also includes about 30 million lines of code and software development records, and employee data dating back to 1986, court filings show.
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The archive extends well beyond email and chat logs. Court records list roughly 17 million OneDrive files, 20.6 million SharePoint files and more than 667,000 IT support tickets, alongside operational detail covering more than 763,000 flights, 5 million crew pairings, 1.2 million fuel slips and records of 787,452 individual parts purchases. The dataset also includes pricing curves and booking behavior, in-flight and Wi-Fi purchase records, refund histories, and pricing data drawn from an estimated 7.2 billion competitor flights.
Google beat a competing $7.5 million bid from Mercor.io Corp., an AI-focused recruiting firm, which was named the backup buyer in case the Google sale falls through, according to the court notice.
The sale excludes Spirit’s roughly 97.5 million passenger profiles and an estimated 50.2 million records tied to the airline’s Free Spirit loyalty program. Under the sale agreement filed with the court, Spirit must deliver the data to a third party for de-identification before Google receives it — but the buyer, not an independent party, selects and pays that third party, and the agreement requires the process to preserve “referential integrity” across the dataset, meaning individual records can still be linked to one another internally even after identifying details are stripped out.
“We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models,” Google said in a statement.
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Spirit ceased operations on May 2, its second Chapter 11 filing in two years, after fuel costs and stalled financing talks forced a shutdown. The airline filed for bankruptcy with about $8.1 billion in debt and laid off roughly 17,000 employees. It secured court approval last month to sell its 22 takeoff and landing slots at New York’s LaGuardia Airport to JetBlue Airways for $58.5 million.
A hearing to approve the Google sale is scheduled for Aug. 19 before Judge Sean Lane.
(Case: In re Spirit Aviation Holdings, Bankr. S.D.N.Y., No. 25-11897)
