Google to acquire bankrupt Spirit Airlines internal data for $10 million 

Tech giant Google has won a bid to acquire a large trove of internal business data from bankrupt airline Spirit Airlines for $10 million. 

The data, which was auctioned off as part of the airline’s liquidation proceedings, includes hundreds of millions of emails, internal Microsoft Teams chats and other corporate materials, such as presentations and other internal documents.  

An important provision to the sale agreement, though, is that all data records will have to be anonymized by a third party before being transferred to Google. The tech company is also barred from trying to de-anonymize it in the future. 

This acquisition takes place at a time in which most incumbents in the travel industry, including large platforms such as Expedia and Booking.com as well as the airlines, are bracing for the disruption which AI-powered tools are expected to bring to the travel distribution scene.  

In this context, Google’s move takes particular relevance. The value of this data for Google is in artificial intelligence (AI) training. It is expected that it will be fed into the company’s models in order to refine them. The data will also likely be used to improve the products Google offers and potentially help develop new ones. 

Passenger and frequent flyer data are explicitly excluded from the data acquired by Google. 

The tech firm won the judicial auction over AI-powered hiring platform Mercor, which submitted the second highest bid ($7.5 million) for the data package. 

Spirit Airlines declared bankruptcy and ceased all operations in May 2026 after experiencing financial difficulties over a protracted period of time and twice filing for Chapter 11 protection in under two years. The post Google to acquire bankrupt Spirit Airlines internal data for $10 million  appeared first on AeroTime.

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