Google won an initial bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines’ business dataset in August 2026 with a $10 million bid, putting decades of airline records into a proposed transaction that still requires court approval. The court is expected to approve the sale at a hearing on Wednesday, and the documents in the case were filed with the New York Bankruptcy Court.
Spirit Airlines had filed for bankruptcy, and its data became an asset available for sale. AI startup Micro1 is willing to pay $12.5 million for the data, above Google’s initial bid.
The records on offer reach far beyond flight operations. The sales list includes 97.5 million passenger records collected since 1992 and 13.7 million email addresses. It also includes personnel files for more than 175,000 workers and 1.5 million internal communications drawn from channels including email and Microsoft Teams.
The broader dataset contains approximately 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, around 30 million lines of code, 7.2 billion competing-flight pricing records and roughly 7.5 billion passenger transactions. Employee files in the collection go back to 1986.
Court filings require the data to be de-identified before it is transferred to Google. Google has also confirmed that customer profiles and credit card data are excluded from what it is acquiring.
The data was intended for AI training. Google said: “We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can help improve our products and AI models.”
The proposed sale shows how information amassed in the ordinary running of a company can become a bankruptcy asset. Companies have made the sale of data during bankruptcy into a global business model, while commercial information such as financial data is outside data-protection laws.
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