Alphabet's Google has reached an agreement to purchase internal business data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines for $10 million. According to Google, the company intends to use the information for product development and to train its artificial intelligence models.
The deal follows the cessation of Spirit Airlines' operations in May 2026. The airline entered bankruptcy proceedings citing high debt levels and rising jet fuel costs, and it has since been liquidating its assets, including flight slots at LaGuardia Airport.
The data involved in the sale includes Spirit's employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, and calendars. It also encompasses various marketing, productivity, and operations data. The agreement specifies that the data will be de-identified before the transaction is finalized to ensure it contains no customer information or personally identifiable information.
Google's $10 million offer outperformed a competing $7.5 million bid from Mercor, an AI data company. A U.S. bankruptcy judge is scheduled to consider the approval of the sale during a court hearing on Wednesday.
On a broader scale, the sale establishes a precedent for how the intellectual and digital remains of a bankrupt corporation can be repurposed for the AI industry. The inclusion of internal productivity and operations data suggests that tech companies are looking beyond public internet data to train their models on specialized, private-sector business logic and communication patterns. The de-identification process is the primary mechanism cited to protect the privacy of the individuals who generated the data during their employment.
The final transfer of these records depends on the outcome of the bankruptcy court hearing. If approved on Wednesday, the assets will move from the airline's estate to Google's development teams. This follows other recent asset liquidations, such as JetBlue's acquisition of Spirit's LaGuardia flight slots in July 2026, as the bankruptcy process moves toward a full distribution of the airline's remaining value.