Google is acquiring internal data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines in a $10 million deal finalized through a bankruptcy auction held in mid-August 2026 [1, 2, 3]. The purchase includes about 100 million employee emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, along with spreadsheets, calendars, marketing, productivity, operations data, software, and pricing information related to the airline’s business operations [2, 4, 5].
Spirit Airlines filed for bankruptcy for the second time in August 2025 and ceased operations in May 2026, leaving the data assets available for sale [1, 4, 5]. Google outbid another AI-focused data company, Mercor, which had offered $7.5 million for the same dataset [1, 6, 4].
A bankruptcy court judge held a hearing on August 19, 2026, to consider approving the sale of Spirit’s data assets to Google [1, 6]. Google plans to use the dataset to train AI models and support product development efforts [1, 2].
A Google spokesperson said, "We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models. We will not receive any personal information from this dataset. Any data we receive will be rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt" [2]. According to sources, all personally identifiable information (PII) and customer data were stripped from the dataset before transfer [1, 2, 7, 4].
Despite these assurances, the Association of Flight Attendants union raised concerns that the privacy protections applied to employee data are insufficient. The union said, "The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing. Hence, the employee data is far more confidential than the customer data, yet receives far less protection than the customer data" [7]. While Google and some sources maintain the employee data is fully de-identified [2, 4, 3], union representatives argue that worker confidentiality laws do not adequately safeguard this information [7].
Spirit Airlines employed about 9,700 full-time workers in 2025, whose internal communications now comprise a significant portion of the sold data [8].
The court's approval hearing on August 19 was the latest step toward finalizing the data sale, which will allow Google to proceed with AI training using the Spirit dataset. [1, 6]
