Bankruptcy auction2025-08-29confirmed

Google LLC × Spirit Aviation Holdings, Inc.

Google LLC acquired a vast trove of internal corporate data from the bankrupt Spirit Airlines for $10 million. [1, 4] The sale, part of Spirit's Chapter 11 proceedings which began on August 29, 2025, was conducted via a section 363 auction. [1, 18] The dataset includes hundreds of millions of employee emails and messages, but explicitly excludes customer data and PII. [4, 6, 9]

Price paid
$10M
asset price, paid once
Losing bid
$7.5M
Mercor.io Corporation
Per unit
0.0012
$ / élément (7 lots agrégés)

The asset

A de-identified corporate dataset including employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, source code, and operational records from the defunct budget carrier.

  • 100M employee_emails
  • 500M microsoft_teams_messages
  • 30M lines_of_code
  • 17.1M onedrive_items
  • 20.6M sharepoint_items
  • 7.5B revenue_transactions
  • 176k employee_records

The record

Seller status
Chapter 11
Sector
airlines
Modalities
text, source_code, structured_data
Jurisdiction
US
Docket
25-11897 (SHL)
Personal data
Data to be de-identified by a third-party agent before transfer; the agreement bars the buyer from intentionally associating the data with any person or household. Customer profiles, loyalty memberships, and other passenger PII were explicitly excluded from the sale. [1, 4, 6, 19]

What it means if you hold data

This transaction is one of the largest known acquisitions of a bankrupt company's proprietary corporate data for the explicit purpose of training AI models. [4] It highlights the growing value of enterprise data 'exhaust' as a source for AI development, setting a potential precedent for future bankruptcy asset sales in the tech and media sectors. [1, 15]

Sources