The Eastern Caribbean island Anguilla’s country-code TLD is “.ai” that can bring up to $30 million for the country by domain name sales.
If you thought all these new websites hosted on a “.ai” domain were using a novel URL meant for artificial intelligence companies, then you were wrong.
Anguilla is a British overseas territory in the Eastern Caribbean. The tropical island’s country-code top-level domain or ccTLD is .ai (like it’s .uk for the United Kingdom). With the surge in AI tools and startups, more and more people are looking for this coveted TLD and incidentally, the sales are soaring.
The 26×6 km island with a few offshore islets is expected to make as much as $30 million in domain registration fees in 2023 alone, as per a Bloomberg finding.
Typically, the country gets paid a portion for all domain sales. When demand increases, domain registration portals can be charged more by the companies that facilitate the sale, and as a result, the country gets paid more.
Many countries drive a considerable side income by making their ccTLDs available for commercial and private companies like Montenegro’s .me is used by Facebook. Others include .tv (Tuvalu), .co (Colombia), .tm (Turkmenistan), .at (Austria), and .cc (Cocos Islands). For example, .cc was extensively used by cryptocurrency websites during the last bubble. Not all countries do this, for example, to get a .fr ccTLD, you must be physically present in France. More on this—For Countries That Own Shorter Web Site Suffixes, Extra Cash From Abroad.
The company that manages the .ai domains for Anguilla, Vince Cate, mentions that the number of site registrations for the .ai ccTLD has effectively doubled to 287,432.
The demand for this TLD began to increase with the popular culture boom of AI. Once people lapped up all that AI had to offer, even tech giants started grabbing their .ai URLs to future-proof any new tool or platform.
Leading .ai websites include Elon Musk’s x.ai, Stability.ai, Perplexity.ai, and Character.ai. Almost all major tech companies own .ai domains even if they don’t have websites hosted on them. They would redirect you to their AI-specific page from these domains. For example, facebook.ai will lead to ai.meta.com, microsoft.ai will lead to microsoft.com/en-us/ai, and google.ai will lead you to ai.google (with .google itself being a TLD).
The price of a .ai domain might differ for you, but registrars like NameCheap and GoDaddy need to pay Anguilla a fixed price of $140 per two-year, up from $120 in April.
