Alphabet (GOOGL) beat a competing bid to acquire Spirit Airlines' 100M emails, 500M Teams chats, and internal code for $10M. JetBlue (JBLU) paid $58.5M for Spirit's 22 LaGuardia slots, a sum far greater than the $10M Google paid for the entire data archive. AI labs have exhausted most public internet text, creating a market for internal corporate data from bankrupt companies.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Google didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' internal business records with a $10 million bid, beating a competing $7.5 million offer from AI recruiting and data startup Mercor.
Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York takes it up at a hearing scheduled for Wednesday, August 19, 2026, and Mercor remains the backup buyer if Google's deal falls through. For a company that guided to $175 billion to $185 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2026, $10 million is a rounding error. What is unusual is the item on the invoice.
The headline compresses it to emails. According to court filings covered by SiliconANGLE and other outlets, the enterprise trove includes: Roughly 500 million Microsoft Teams chats 30 million lines of code, plus software algorithms and development metadata Pricing models, booking-curve data and flight behavior data Revenue, aircraft operations and employee productivity records Roughly 3.4 million payroll records, with employee data dating back to 1986 This is an entire enterprise archive, the kind of internal record that does not exist on the public internet. Passenger information is excluded.
Spirit's 97.5 million passenger profiles, roughly 50 million Free Spirit loyalty program records, and 740,000 co-branded credit cardholders are all carved out. Google has said the remaining data will be "rigorously scrubbed" of personal information by a third-party service provider, and a court filing from PJT Partners, Spirit's investment bank, describes the data as being deidentified. A Google spokesperson framed the rationale simply: "We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models." A market has emerged for data from dead companies.
Gizmodo reported in April 2026 that failed startups have been selling off old Slack chats and email archives to AI firms to extract remaining value from collapsed businesses. Mercor, the losing bidder, is central to that market. The Wall Street Journal reported in April 2026 that Mercor has been offering professionals cash for materials from their former employers to capture industry-specific knowledge for AI training.
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