Google Paid $10 Million at Spirit Airlines' Bankruptcy Auction for 100M Emails and 500M Teams Messages to Train AI — Outbidding Data Vendor Mercor's $7.5M

The Register (corroborated by Axios, CNN Business, Bloomberg Law, Skift)·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Court filings unsealed this week show Google won a bankruptcy auction for the internal corpus of the collapsed budget carrier: roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams items, 17 million OneDrive files, 20.5 million SharePoint items, 30+ million recorded customer service calls, 600,000 ServiceNow tickets, 763,000 flight records and 787,452 aircraft-parts purchase records. The losing bidder was Mercor, an AI training-data company, at $7.5 million. Customer and loyalty data covering 97.5 million passengers was explicitly excluded and Google says a third party will strip remaining PII — but the precedent is the story: an operating company's entire Teams and email history is now a priced, auctionable AI training asset when it dies.