Google buys Spirit Airlines' data trove to train AI

Google agreed to pay $10 million for a trove of the defunct Spirit Airlines’ internal data at a bankruptcy asset auction, Tom’s Hardware reported; the bid beat a competing $7.5 million offer from Mercor, a company that supplies AI labs with human-annotated training data. Spirit ended its flights in May 2026 after filing for bankruptcy, and the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York was due to consider approving the sale on 19 August, according to Simple Flying, which reviewed the sale filing.

Reporting on the filing said the trove includes roughly 100 million internal emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, alongside corporate records covering operations, revenue, aircraft maintenance and pricing, and — per Tom’s Hardware — billions of flight-pricing records and anonymised passenger records. Simple Flying reported the deal excludes customers’ credit-card information. Google said the data would be used to train its AI systems. Mercor, the underbidder, was reported to have been named in the filing as the backup buyer should Google’s purchase not close.

The transaction illustrated a route into AI training data that bypasses the licensing negotiations more familiar from disputes with publishers or platform operators: a company’s internal correspondence and operational records, generated by employees who had no say in the matter, sold as a liquidation asset once the business itself had stopped trading. It followed a pattern, seen elsewhere in the industry that year, of AI developers acquiring large bodies of proprietary corporate data through corporate distress rather than direct licensing deals.