Google Wins Auction for Spirit Airlines' Internal Data with $10M Bid

Google has won an auction for Spirit Airlines' internal data, paying $10 million for 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chats to improve its products and train AI models.

The proposed purchase covers a wide range of material, including employee communications, operational records, documents, custom software, and customer-service workflows. The archive contains sensitive information about how people make decisions, coordinate with colleagues, fix mistakes, and navigate business systems, all of which could help train AI agents designed to perform workplace tasks.

The auction began with a $5 million offer from Google, but the company increased its bid to $10 million after AI training startup Mercor entered the process as backup bidder. Spirit Airlines ceased operations earlier this year after failing to emerge from its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and attorneys handling its estate have been selling its remaining assets.

A third party will remove personally identifiable information (PII) from the material before it's transferred, with Google paying the anonymization costs. However, cleaning decades of employee emails and workplace chats is unlikely to be straightforward, as conversations can contain sensitive details that could reveal identities even after names, addresses, and other obvious markers have been stripped away.