The small island of Anguilla, located to the east of Puerto Rico, is a quiet paradise of coral and beaches that has recently been rocked by a lucky coincidence: it is in charge of distributing Internet addresses that end in .ai, an ending that it is now in vogue due to the rise of artificial intelligence.
X.ai, Google.ai and Facebook.ai are some of the great examples of this use, which large companies use to direct visitors to the web pages of their companies dedicated to AI and that have triggered site registrations that end with these letters to reach 287,432, according to Vince Cate, who for decades has managed the .ai domain for Anguilla.
According to Cate, Anguilla will bring in up to $30 million in domain registration fees this year, thus benefiting from the general boom around artificial intelligence and its effects on the entire global economy: “Since November 30, things they are very different here,” explains the official.
In fact, the impact of these benefits is beginning to be felt in Anguilla, where for the last few decades it has lived mainly from tourism, but is now experiencing a very notable increase in revenue from .ai domains.
The price of an .ai domain can vary, just like a .com or any other type of domain name, but registrars like GoDaddy or NameCheap must pay Anguilla a fixed price: $140 per two-person .ai domain registration. years, a price that has also been increasing along with its demand.
The case of Anguilla is also reminiscent of the island of Tuvalu, since it has benefited from its own country code. Its .tv domain is used by various video-focused websites such as Twitch, leading the micronation to earn $7.1 million in 2019, 8% of total government revenue.
