Why Google just paid $10 m for Microsoft Teams chats of a dead and bankrupt airline
Google has purchased the digital archives of the bankrupt Spirit Airlines for $10 million, seeking access to millions of internal emails, code repositories, and operational data. The acquisition is intended to provide high-quality, multi-step workflow data to train AI agents, which is increasingly scarce on the public web.
Why it matters
This signals a shift in AI development where companies are turning to private, proprietary operational data to overcome the limitations of public internet scraping.
Google has agreed to pay $10 million for the digital remains of Spirit Airlines, and the shopping list is stranger than the price tag. The package includes roughly 100 million company emails spread across 80,000 accounts, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, about 30 million lines of code, and more than 175,000 employee records with a system of record running back to August 1986. Judge Sean Lane was set to consider the sale in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Wednesday morning.Spirit stopped flying on May 2, midway through its second Chapter 11 in two years, having filed with around $8.1 billion in debt and laid off roughly 17,000 people. What survives is an archive, and the auction for it was competitive. Google opened at $5 million.
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