Google just won the bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' data with a $10 million bid. The haul includes roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, and a pile of spreadsheets, calendars, and operational documents. Google says it plans to use all of it to improve its products and AI models. AI data company Mercor also bid — but its $7.5 million final offer wasn't enough. The deal still needs approval from the US bankruptcy court.
This isn't just a one-off. In April, the defunct cielo24 sold 13 years' worth of Slack, Jira, email, and Google Drive data for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Shortly after, SimpleClosure launched Asset Hub, a service that helps shut-down companies sell off their code and office data. It says it has handled nearly 100 asset deals for closed companies in the past year. Competitor Sunset is doing the same thing.
And the market isn't limited to dead companies anymore. micro1 is working with 50 companies, each paying between $100,000 and $2 million-plus for access to real business workflow data. Handshake AI is now soliciting work documents from individuals, paying up to $30,000 for files people legally own.
Why the rush? AI companies are desperate for corporate emails, chats, and internal documents because these files capture how work actually happens — exactly the kind of material you need to train and test AI agents. Now that companies can profit from their leftovers even after they shut down, that "digital legacy" is a resource nobody expected.