Google won a bankruptcy auction in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York with a $10 million bid for internal business data and software code from bankrupt Spirit Airlines, beating Mercor's $7.5 million offer. According to Sina Finance, Google said the assets could help optimize its products and AI models, and added that all data it obtains will be strictly processed by a third party to remove personally identifiable information.

Mercor said many companies hold decades of records that fully restore how real businesses operate, and called Spirit Airlines' data a representative example of the value of assets sold in bankruptcy. The deal still needs approval at a hearing on Wednesday.

People familiar with the matter said Google is buying Spirit Airlines' internal corporate data and is not receiving customer information or credit card-related data. Sources said the court will appoint an independent third party at Wednesday's hearing to ensure the data is stripped of personal information.

Mercor and several other companies have recently been competing to buy corporate data from bankrupt or acquired companies. Slack chat logs, GitHub and Asana content, Google Docs, and years of employee meeting records have all been used to train and run AI models.

Spirit Airlines stopped operating in May and laid off about 17,000 people. The assets sold at auction included employee emails and chat records.