The artificial intelligence boom has benefited chatbot makers, computer scientists, and tech investors. AI is also big business for Anguilla, a tiny island in the Caribbean. After all, it controls the .ai internet address.
ChatGPT’s debut nearly two years ago heralded the dawn of the AI age. Companies scrambled to acquire websites that end in .ai.
The digital gold rush began. Yee-haw!
Google uses the .ai domain name to showcase its artificial intelligence services. Elon Musk uses it for the homepage for his Grok AI chatbot. AI search engine Perplexity and others snapped up .ai web addresses, redirecting users from the .com version.
That’s where Anguilla comes in. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) gave the British territory control of the .ai internet address in the 1990s. The .ai address was one of hundreds of obscure domains assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names. Domains are supposed to indicate a website has a link to a particular region or language—but that’s not always the case.
Anguilla beat out nearby Antigua for ownership of the .ai domain in 1995. The choice could have gone the other way since both places have the letters in their names.
The domain has become a goldmine. Anguilla’s earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled last year to $32 million. The island’s premier, Ellis Webster, expects domain-related revenues to continue rising. He thinks this year’s revenue could even double from last year.
Today, there are more than 533,000 .ai web domains. Income from .ai now accounts for about 20% of Anguilla’s total government revenue.
Anguilla’s government collects a fee—$140 for two years—every time a .ai web address renews. Identity Digital Chief Strategy Officer Ram Mohan says the territory also receives payment when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have brought in tens of thousands of dollars.
The money directly boosts the economy of Anguilla. The territory is just 35 square miles with a population of about 16,000. God blessed the island with coral reefs, clear waters, and palm-fringed white sand beaches. It’s become a haven for uber-wealthy tourists. Still, many residents are poor, and the pandemic battered tourism. Before that, a powerful hurricane devasted parts of the island.
Anguilla doesn’t have its own AI industry, though Webster hopes that one day it will become a hub for the technology. He says the money from .ai takes the pressure off government finances and helps fund key projects. But he also cautions, “You can’t predict how long this is going to last.”
Webster says the money will help finance the airport’s expansion, medical care for senior citizens, and completion of a vocational technology training center at Anguilla’s high school.
The income also provides “budget support” for other projects the government is developing. These include a fund to help the community recover from hurricanes. The island currently relies on assistance from Britain, which imposes conditions, Webster says.
He adds, “I don’t want to have our economy and our country and all our programs just based on this. And then all of a sudden there’s a new fad comes up in the next year or two.” That could leave Anguilla without money it has come to depend on.
To help keep up with the explosive growth in domain registrations, Anguilla announced Tuesday it will sign a deal with domain management company Identity Digital.
A benefit of that partnership is that .ai websites will no longer need to connect through a single internet cable to the island. The single cable leaves sites at risk for digital bottlenecks or physical disruptions.
Now they’ll use Identity Digital’s global servers. Connection should be faster because servers will be closer to users. According to Mohan, connection speed “goes from milliseconds to microseconds.”
Anguilla hopes that acceleration puts the rush in “gold rush.”
