The physical fleet may be grounded, but seems like the digital footprint of Spirit Airlines will live on inside Google’s server farms.
Google emerged as the winning bidder in a bankruptcy court auction, agreeing to pay $10 million for the defunct budget carrier’s internal enterprise records, according to filings made in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.
The tech giant outbid AI data startup Mercor, which offered $7.5 million, to secure the corporate vault.
Google intends to use the trove of internal operations material to advance product development and train its artificial intelligence models.
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The acquired assets encompass a broad sweep of corporate communications and proprietary technical property created during the airline’s operations.
The repository includes approximately 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 digital archive also features operational records, flight scheduling data, internal financial audits, marketing strategies, and pricing metrics tracking billions of historical transactions.
As AI developers run low on publicly available web content to feed large language models, technology firms are increasingly bidding on non-public corporate records, considering internal messaging channels, custom algorithms, and workplace archives offer models structured, real-world examples of project management, technical development, and professional problem-solving.
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Addressing privacy considerations, Google confirmed that the transaction excludes 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.
“We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can help improve our products and AI models,” Google said in a statement.
Under the terms of the court filings, an independent third party will anonymize the dataset to strip out names, contact credentials, and other personal markers before transferring the files to Google.
Google will fund the anonymization process, retaining review rights over the scrubbing protocols to ensure referential linkages across records remain intact for machine learning purposes.
The transaction remains subject to judicial authorization. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean H. Lane is scheduled to consider final approval of the sale during a court hearing on Wednesday.