In not-so-surprising news, the .si domain name is seeing unprecedented demand after President Trump signed an executive order mandating all government agencies to refer to “AI” and “artificial intelligence” as “SI” and “superintelligence.” It echoes what happened at the start of the AI boom, when interest in the .ai domain name — associated with the country Anguilla — spiked and brought in millionsfor the island territory.
Now it’s .si’s turn in the spotlight. The domain name was commonly associated with Slovenia, where, ironically, First Lady Melania Trump is from. Klara Herman, a spokesperson at Registry SI, the official organization that manages Slovenia’s domains, told the BBC earlier this weekthat there was a 2,199% increase in .si domain name purchases in September. However, she was cautious about linking the boost only to President Trump.
Still, the Registry noted 11,000 new addresses recorded on September 30, the day after President Trump signed the executive order, and almost 13,000 new .si domain names were registered in the past 24 hours.
We reached out to a few other web hosting sites to see if they had seen similar trends. GoDaddy said they don’t yet host the .si domain, and Squarespace hadn’t yet responded as of the time of publication. Wix, interestingly enough, said that they weren’t seeing any “meaningful uptick” on their end, and that it’s been minimal on the site since September 29. “It’s still early so that could change,” a Wix spokesperson said.
But web hosting platform Hostinger told me that .si is now its second most popular domain extension, right after .com. It found that among its customers, almost 4,300 registered .si on September 30 and about 5,400 on October 1; more than three-quarters of all .si domains registered since September 23 came in the last two days. It found that more than half the buyers were coming from the U.S. and India.
Curiously enough, on Hostinger, only around 3% of the .si domains are explicitly related to AI, it said. Most are “unclassified” — meaning their names don’t match any specific category. It said that most of those registering the .si domain name seem to be people and businesses, though there is a speculative element, in that people could be buying the domains to resell them later.
Upon hearing this, my first thought went back to what a founder messaged me earlier this week, noting that .si domains were reselling for over a million dollars. Kim Than, CEO of Genius PR, who specializes in working with AI and crypto founders, told me that he already bought the .si version of his company name “to protect the brand in case this takes off like .ai.” And did so because it was cheap, so he figured he might as well “secure it now than potentially pay a lot more later.”
Than sees domain names as digital collectibles and wants to pick up a few more while the price is still good, and he might resell them later; one can also tokenize domains, he said, and trade them on the blockchain, though he’s not sure if .si is supported just yet. “A few founder friends are buying too ’cause we think it’s the new AI boom,” he continued. “Who knows how far it goes, but I’m happy to take a bet.”
There is a chance that .si could become pretty popular. President Trump’s executive order said that“the capabilities of today’s frontier systems do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence,” and that they “increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence but a new super intelligence.”
Klaudijus Januitis, head of domains at Hostinger, told me that he expects the demand for .si to keep growing, though he doesn’t see that domain replacing .ai anytime soon. Instead, as noted by that founder and his friends, Januitis said .si is right now a more available and a “more affordable second option.”
“Slovenia will not see what Anguilla saw,” he said, noting that, for one, Anguilla charges a “premium” to use .ai and that money goes straight to the government, while .si is a fraction of the cost and goes to the registry rather than the treasury. For example, on Hostinger, .si costs around $12 dollars a year while .ai goes for $90 and requires a two-year commitment. “For Anguilla, .ai became a second economy. For Slovenia, .si is a nice bonus.”
Source: techcrunch.com
