Google wins Spirit Airlines bankruptcy data auction for $10M

Google will pay $10 million to a bankrupt airline for its internal emails and Teams chats.

Spirit Airlines, which ceased operations earlier in 2026 after failing to emerge from its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy, ran an auction for the enterprise data it leaves behind. Google won. Mercor.io Corp. bid $7.5 million and was named the backup buyer, Bloomberg Law reported. A sale hearing is set for August 19, 2026, before Judge Sean H. Lane in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

The corpus is unusual for its density. Court filings list roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats and collaboration records, about 30 million lines of code with development metadata, and more than 175,000 employee records dating to 1986. It also carries pricing on 7.2 billion competitor flights and roughly 7.5 billion passenger transaction records going back to 2008.

Google's statement is brief. "We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models," the company said, adding that the data will be "rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt."

Passenger-facing personal data is not part of the deal. Spirit's 97.5 million passenger profiles and roughly 50.2 million Free Spirit loyalty program records stay out, along with privileged communications.

The filing does not name the third party doing the scrubbing. It also does not say what recourse, if any, former Spirit employees have over internal messages they wrote at work dating to 1986 that will now feed Google's model training. This makes one of well over two hundred Google items we've logged in the last three months; most were model releases like Gemini 3.7 Flash two days ago, not purchase orders for another company's inbox.