In August 2026, a bankruptcy court in New York put a price on something most companies never think of as an asset: their internal records. Google won an auction for a slice of Spirit Airlines' enterprise data with a $10 million bid, beating a $7.5 million offer from Mercor, an AI data company that was named the backup buyer (Bloomberg Law).
What Google actually bought
Not customer data. Passenger profiles and loyalty program records were excluded from the sale. What Google bought was the operational record of a business: marketing, HR, strategy, and project management files, plus roughly 30 million lines of code and related development data (Bloomberg Law). Reporting also described internal emails, Teams messages, spreadsheets, and calendars in the cache (Outlook Business).
Google said a third party would scrub the data of personally identifiable information before it received anything, and that it wanted the data to improve its products and AI models.
Why an airline's inbox is worth eight figures
AI models learned to write from the public internet. What they still can't do well is real work: chase a late vendor, reprice a route, resolve a billing dispute, close a project. The record of how people do those things lives inside company systems, not on the web. That's why AI labs and data companies are now competing for it.
Mercor's role is telling. It's a company whose business is supplying training data to AI labs, and it reportedly offered even more for the right to take the raw data and de-identify it itself (Reclaim The Net). Data companies see operational records as inventory they can resell.
You don't need to be an airline
Spirit's data was valuable because it was years deep, spanned many systems, and showed real decisions being made. A 40-person distributor with ten years of Salesforce, Xero, and support history has the same qualities at a smaller scale. The buyers are the same, and so is the requirement: data that is rights-cleared and stripped of personal information before it changes hands.
The takeaways for an operating business
- Your records have a market. The Spirit auction is the clearest public price signal yet for company operational data.
- You don't have to go bankrupt to sell. Healthy companies can license a de-identified copy and keep running.
- De-identification is the standard. Serious buyers expect personal data removed before delivery, just as Google required.
- Price isn't the only term. Exclusivity, acceptance, payment timing, and de-identification deadlines all matter. See deal terms, explained.
If you want to know what your company's records might be worth, get a ballpark estimate. It takes about a minute.