What just happened? Google has won an auction for Spirit Airlines' internal data, offering $10 million for the defunct carrier's workplace communications, operational records, documents, and custom software. The tech giant plans to use the material to improve its products and train AI models. However, the sale still requires approval from a federal bankruptcy judge at a hearing on Wednesday.

The proposed purchase covers employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, calendars, marketing material, aircraft operations, revenue management, and worker productivity data.

Court documents show that the archive contains around 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chats. The collection also reportedly contains 17 million OneDrive files, more than 20 million SharePoint items, and 516 code repositories holding about 30 million lines of custom software.

Google will also receive pricing models, booking curves, flight records, crew schedules, fuel slips, financial databases, IT support tickets, and customer-service workflows.

Unlike material scraped from websites, these records show how people make decisions, coordinate with colleagues, fix mistakes, and navigate business systems – all of which could help train AI agents that are designed to perform workplace tasks.

The auction began with a $5 million offer from Google. AI training startup Mercor then entered the process and was ultimately named backup bidder with a $7.5 million proposal. Google secured the assets after increasing its offer to $10 million.

The company says it's not buying Spirit's customer or credit-card information, so don't worry too much if you previously traveled with the airline. A third party will remove personally identifiable information (PII) from the material before it's transferred, with Google paying the anonymization costs. Google will also be prohibited from attempting to identify people from the sanitized data.

Cleaning decades of employee emails and workplace chats is unlikely to be straightforward, though. These conversations can contain sensitive details and enough contextual information to reveal identities even after names, addresses, and other obvious markers have been stripped away.

Spirit ceased operations earlier this year after failing to emerge from its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Attorneys handling its estate have since been selling its remaining assets, including its enormous trove of data.

The deal is a much larger example of the market for failed startups' internal data that emerged earlier this year as part of the race to obtain more AI training material.