Google has acquired a large collection of deidentified data from the failed US airline Spirit, according to a report based on a court filing described on the date of 2026-08-18. The purchase, valued at $10 million, still required judicial approval, and formed part of Spirit’s liquidation process after the carrier permanently grounded itself in May 2026.
The data package was one of the assets being auctioned as Spirit sought to raise money and address debts during its wind-up. The Register reported that Spirit’s financial problems began after COVID-19 disrupted air travel in 2020, after which the low-cost airline continued to record losses and did not recover enough to remain in operation.
The asset purchased by Google was unusually broad. The reported contents included more than 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams items, 17 million OneDrive files and 20.5 million SharePoint items. The collection also included more than 30 million recorded customer service calls and more than 15 million customer service chat records.
Other business systems were represented as well. The Register said the trove included 600,000 ServiceNow tickets, 13.7 million active email addresses from Oracle’s Responsys marketing application, and records covering 11 million sales of in-flight Wi-Fi services. Operational files were also part of the sale, including records for more than 763,000 flights, five million crew pairings, more than 1.2 million fuel slips and purchases of 787,452 parts.
Google reportedly said it bought the data to improve its AI services. The underbidder was Mercor, identified in the report as a company that supplies data for training AI models. That bidding context suggests the Spirit archive was viewed not merely as leftover corporate paperwork, but as material with potential value for artificial intelligence development.
The sale also highlights the growing market for specialized data at a time when AI companies are looking beyond broad public text collections. A failed airline’s internal records could contain examples of operational planning, customer support interactions, logistics, procurement and workplace communications. The evidence provided does not specify how Google intended to use the material beyond improving AI services.
Privacy questions are central to the transaction because the collection originated from a consumer airline and included customer service calls, chat records, marketing data and flight-related operations. The court filing described in the report said the material had been deidentified before being offered for sale. Google also promised to remove personally identifiable information if it found any remaining in the trove.
The purchase had not become final solely through the auction result. Because the data was being sold through Spirit’s liquidation process, the $10 million winning bid was still pending court approval at the time described in the report. If approved, the transaction would turn part of Spirit’s remaining corporate estate into an AI-related asset for one of the world’s largest technology companies.
