100mn emails, 500mn messages, codes, and more: Google has access to a ton of data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines
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Spirit Airlines ceased operations in May after filing for bankruptcy a second time. Photograph: (Unsplash)
Google is acquiring a horde of data from the bankrupt Spirit Airlines after winning a bankruptcy auction, beating Mercor. This treasure trove will include millions of emails, internal messages, flight records, employee data and a lot more.
Google will soon get its hands on 100 million employee emails and approximately 500 million Microsoft Teams messages from Spirit Airlines, which ceased operations after going bankrupt earlier this year. It will pay $10 million for this trove of data that it will use to help train artificial intelligence (AI) systems, according to bankruptcy case documents. Google outbid Mercor, an AI training startup that placed a $7.5 million offer.
Which Spirit Airlines data Google gets
Besides the emails and Teams messages, it will also gain access to more than 17 million OneDrive files, over 20 million SharePoint documents, spreadsheets, calendars, board presentations, and budget walkthroughs. It also includes 516 engineering repositories containing nearly 30 million lines of code and technical logs. Over 190 million booking records, schedules of flights and the crew, records of more than 175,000 employees, and payroll and tax filings from as far back as 1986 are all part of the documents from Spirit Airlines. employee
Which Spirit Airlines data Google does not get
Passenger profiles and their frequent flyer information have been excluded. Google said that a third party will remove all personally identifiable information before the data is handed over. It will be "deidentified", meaning that it won't be associated with any specific people and the buyer will not attempt to re-identify the users. A Google spokesperson said in a statement, "We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can help improve our products and AI models," as quoted by Axios.
Why does this matter?
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Several companies are trying to get similar information, such as internal corporate communications, which they want to use to train their systems. The idea is to help AI models simulate real-world business processes. Spirit Airlines halted operations in early May after filing for bankruptcy for the second time in less than a year, in August 2025.
