Google Wins $10M Bid for Spirit’s Internal Data to Train AI

Google won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Spirit Airlines’ internal records—including roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Teams chats, 17 million OneDrive files, 20 million SharePoint items, and 516 code repositories with about 30 million lines of software—for $10 million, with federal court approval still required. A third party will anonymize PII before transfer, and Google will not receive customer or credit-card data or attempt to identify individuals. The dataset, which also covers flight operations, pricing, crew schedules, and IT workflows, could help train AI that performs workplace tasks, though extracting value from such sensitive communications is complex. Spirit ceased operations earlier this year after a second Chapter 11 bankruptcy, underscoring a growing market for failed startups’ internal data for AI training.