The small Caribbean island of Anguilla owns the internet domain .ai. Since the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, demand has been growing enormously.
For many years, the Caribbean island of Anguilla lived from tourism and its dream beaches. Now she lives from her Internet domain, the country code for Internet addresses. The British overseas territory with just 15,000 inhabitants owns the top-level domain .ai. Because Artificial Intelligence is abbreviated as AI, demand for the domain is through the roof given the hype surrounding artificial intelligence.
“We started selling the domain about 15 years ago, and then the demand doubled every year and a half or two years. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger,” said Vince Cate in an interview with n-tv. He emigrated to Anguilla from the USA many years ago and now manages the domains for the island.
In the summer of 2018, around 48,000 domains with the ending .ai were registered, four years later there were already 144,000. “When Chat GPT came out, it really took off. That’s when we knew we were doing really well,” said Cate. In December 2023, 354,000 .ai domains were registered, now there are more than 400,000.
Google, Microsoft, Meta – almost all major tech companies have secured a domain. And of course many new companies that have jumped on the AI bandwagon. “It brings companies attention. Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence,” said Jon Christoph Berndt, brand expert and managing director of Brandamazing, in an interview with n-tv.
Tuvalu as a role model
Anguilla benefits from this. Each domain ending in .ai brings the island $140 for two years. With 400,000 domains, that’s around $28 million a year. “The government managed to abolish the property tax. I don’t know of any other country that has abolished the property tax. And they have paid off their debt significantly,” explains Vince Cate.
According to the same principle, the Pacific state of Tuvalu has also benefited from its .tv domain for years. However, the extreme demand for such endings is leveling off again, according to brand expert Berndt: “The most important thing is always the .com address or the nation address” – like the .de in Germany.”
There are more than 160 million .com addresses registered worldwide, and there are more than 17 million sites with the .de ending. Anguilla is still a long way from that. But the hype is likely to continue for now. According to Cate, the Caribbean island could finance two thirds of its budget with domain revenue by the end of this year.