Google Spirit Airlines Data Bid: An airline company shut down, its planes stopped taking off and employees were forced to find jobs elsewhere. However, the company’s age-old e-mails, chats, documents and business records are still worth crores of rupees. The main reason behind this is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Google has made the highest bid of around ₹ 95.75 crore to buy the internal data of recently declared bankrupt US airline Spirit Airlines. The deal does not involve customer information but the company’s internal transaction data.
According to the report, this internal data package includes about 10 million e-mails and about 50 million Microsoft Teams chat messages. Also included are company calendars, documents, spreadsheets, workflows and software records. Generally this type of information is considered highly confidential. But after Spirit Airlines filed for bankruptcy in May 2026 and completely shut down, an auction of its assets was launched, with its digital data also up for sale. AI data company Mercor also bid ₹71.81 crore in this auction.
Google’s masterplan for training AI models
Google wants to use this data to make its artificial intelligence models and products smarter. Until now AI was trained only through articles, books and photos available on the internet. But, in the real corporate world, this kind of data can be extremely valuable in understanding how employees work, how they solve problems, how decisions are made in teams, and how customer complaints are resolved.
Employee privacy and court objection
The deal has not yet been completed as a US bankruptcy court has objected to the sale and employee unions have also opposed it. Due to which the court has postponed the next hearing till September 9. Google has clarified that all personally identifiable information (PII) will be removed prior to sale. However, the incident has raised a big question about whether the private conversations employees have with the company could become a selling point for AI after the company shuts down. Human behavior data will be the greatest treasure for AI in the future.