Spirit Airlines stopped flying on May 2, 2026. But its digital exhaust, the millions of internal emails, chat messages, and lines of code generated over four decades, is now the subject of a multi-million dollar bidding war between Google and a pair of AI startups.
Google won the initial auction on August 14 with a $10 million bid for access to Spirit’s de-identified business records. AI training startup Micro1 then submitted a late counter-offer of $12.5 million, throwing the bankruptcy court’s approval process into uncertainty ahead of a key hearing scheduled for September 9.
What’s actually for sale
The dataset includes roughly 100 million de-identified emails, approximately 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, around 30 million lines of custom software code, and employee files stretching back to 1986.
The assets explicitly exclude passenger profiles, loyalty program data, and personally identifiable information. This is an operational dataset, the kind of internal communications corpus that reveals how a large organization actually functions day to day.
The bidding war
The auction played out in stages. Mercor, a data and talent company specializing in AI, served as the backup bidder with an offer of $7.5 million. Google topped that with $10 million and walked away as the winner.
Then things got complicated. Micro1, an AI training startup led by CEO Ali Ansari, submitted a $12.5 million counter-offer after the auction deadline had passed. That bid, 25% above Google’s winning price, forced the bankruptcy court to consider whether to reopen the process or stick with the original result.
The court overseeing the case is led by Judge Sean H. Lane in the Southern District of New York. For context, Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a second time before ceasing operations entirely. Every additional dollar from the data sale goes toward paying down claims from creditors who are unlikely to recover much from a defunct ultra-low-cost carrier.
Union objections add another layer
The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA has filed objections raising serious concerns about privacy and the handling of employee data.
Their argument is straightforward: even if the dataset has been stripped of passenger PII, it still contains decades of employee files and internal communications. Flight attendants and other workers never consented to having their workplace communications sold to a tech giant for AI model training.
Google has indicated it would further de-identify the dataset before using it for AI model training, but the union’s objections suggest that additional de-identification may not be sufficient to address their concerns.
The September 9 hearing will determine whether Google keeps its winning bid, whether Micro1’s late offer gets consideration, and whether the union’s privacy objections carry enough weight to block or modify the sale.