Domains

Trump’s ‘Super Intelligence’ Sparks a Rush on .si Domains

Line chart of daily new .si and .ai domain registrations, 15 to 29 September 2026
New .si vs .ai domain registrations per day. Chart: Domaintechnik

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One word from the U.S. president, and suddenly Slovenia is the new Anguilla. Since Donald Trump began renaming artificial intelligence “Super Intelligence,” domain investors and companies have been piling into .si, the country code of Slovenia and thus the homeland of First Lady Melania Trump. Since Mr. Trump’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly just over a week ago, more .si than .ai domains have been registered every day, according to an analysis by the Austrian hosting provider Domaintechnik based on data from domainnamestat.com.

From a Truth Social Post to an Executive Order

It started with Mr. Trump asking on Truth Social whether “Artificial Intelligence” should be renamed, because the word “artificial” made the technology sound wrong. A few days later, he told the U.N. General Assembly that the U.S. government would henceforth call A.I. “Super Intelligence,” or SI for short. He has since signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to use the new terms. The phrase has even entered talks with China.

.si Overtakes .ai

The numbers are clear. On a normal September day, about 100 new .si domains used to be added. The day after Mr. Trump’s U.N. speech, there were 3,234, more than 30 times as many. In the following week, 17,621 new .si domains were registered, compared with only 7,209 new .ai domains, nearly two and a half times as many. The total number of .si domains grew from 241,846 to 262,319 in eleven days, an increase of 8.5 percent.

The idea is not entirely new, though. Back in May, about three times as many .si domains as in a normal month were registered, according to Domaintechnik, as investors bet that “SI” would catch on as shorthand for superintelligence. There is also a practical advantage: .si domains are open to anyone worldwide, with no residency in Slovenia required, and can be registered for a single year. An .ai domain, by contrast, requires a minimum term of two years.

Mostly Speculation

The buyers are mostly speculators. According to the security company Netcraft, about 52 percent of the .si domains registered through the U.S. registrar Dynadot were put up for sale shortly afterward, including names like donaldjtrump.si. Asking prices are ambitious: build.si is on offer for $10 million (about 8.5 million euros), seed.si for $8 million. Very few addresses are actually used. Of 35 publicly documented .si sales in the first half of the year, only two went to companies using the domain themselves, such as the A.I. start-up Recursive, which paid $20,000 for recursive.si.

The boom also has a dark side. On the keyboard, the “s” sits right next to the “a,” so a .si address is just one typo away from the .ai address of a well-known A.I. service. More than 44,000 .si domains share a name with an existing .ai domain, according to Netcraft. Its researchers warn that criminals could use such look-alikes for phishing.

No Second Anguilla

For Slovenia itself, the hype is unlikely to be big business. The national registry, Register.si, confirms a “strong but stable increase” in demand but denies reports of windfall profits, saying revenue per domain is small. The trade publication Domain Name Wire estimates the additional revenue in September at about 300,000 euros. At the same time, the registry is advising brand and company owners to secure their .si domain “as soon as possible.”

The picture is very different for the Caribbean island of Anguilla, which owns the .ai ending. It took in about $85.3 million (roughly 73 million euros) from it in 2025, equal to 47 percent of its government budget. How the A.I. boom made the island rich shows what a domain ending can do when the term behind it takes hold for good. Whether “SI” will manage that, or remain a White House fad, is an open question.

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