Google Pays $10M for Spirit Airlines Data to Train AI

Google outbid AI data startup Mercor, which had offered $7.5 million, to secure the corporate archive in a sale overseen by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

The purchased assets include about 100 million corporate emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 30 million lines of custom software code, and more than 175,000 employee records dating back to 1986. The archive also holds operational records, flight scheduling data, internal financial audits, marketing strategies, and pricing metrics covering billions of historical transactions.

Google said it will use the material to improve its products and train AI models, as tech firms increasingly turn to private corporate records for structured, real-world examples of project management and technical development.

The deal excludes all personal traveler information. Spirit's databases containing 97.5 million passenger profiles and 50.2 million loyalty program accounts were left out of the purchase.

An independent third party will anonymize the dataset, stripping names and contact credentials before transfer. Google will fund the anonymization process and retain review rights over the scrubbing protocols to keep referential linkages intact for machine learning. The sale awaits final approval from U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean H. Lane at a hearing on Wednesday.