AI Funded a Tiny Caribbean Island. Could Trump’s “SI” Create a Boom for Slovenia?

One of the most unexpected beneficiaries of the artificial intelligence boom has been a small territory in the Caribbean, thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley.

The .ai domain used by thousands of AI companies today was never created for artificial intelligence. It is the country-code domain of Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory with a population of around 16,000. But when Artificial Intelligence became simply AI, those two letters unexpectedly turned into one of the most recognizable symbols of the technology industry.

Startups began buying .ai domains in huge numbers. For a company, an address like company.ai immediately communicates what it does, so the country-code domain of a tiny Caribbean territory effectively became an international domain for the AI industry.

For Anguilla, this turned into an extraordinary economic opportunity. According to the IMF, .ai generated around $32 million for the territory in 2023 — more than 20% of its government revenue. Anguilla didn’t build a major AI model, manufacture GPUs, or construct data centers. It simply happened to get two very valuable letters decades ago.

Now, something similar may be starting in Europe.

Trump Wants to Replace AI With SI

On September 29, 2026, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14434, “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence.” The order directs U.S. executive agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official communications, websites, reports, and other non-statutory documents.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the entire world suddenly has to stop saying AI. For now, the new terminology applies to the U.S. executive branch, and AI has been embedded in technology, science, and business for far too long to disappear because of a single executive order.

But if the term Super Intelligence spreads beyond U.S. government documents and SI actually becomes widely used across the technology industry, there is an interesting side effect.

The .si domain already exists.

And it belongs to Slovenia.

People Are Already Buying .si Domains

This is where the story stops being just an interesting hypothesis.

After Trump began publicly promoting the term Super Intelligence, Slovenia’s domain registry recorded a sharp increase in .si registrations. According to figures from ARNES/Register.si reported by Foreign Policy, around 1,000 new .si domains had previously been registered per month. After the SI story emerged, more than 6,000 domains were registered in just two days — over 2,000 on the first day and more than 4,000 the next.

Netcraft found something even more interesting. During a 25-hour period following Trump’s remarks, .si registrations actually surpassed .ai registrations. Its researchers also found signs of speculative buying of Slovenian domains following the appearance of the new terminology.

The surge continued after the executive order was signed. According to Registry SI data reported by TechCrunch, around 11,000 new .si domains were registered on September 30 alone — the day after the order was signed. Hostinger separately reported around 4,300 .si registrations on September 30 and another 5,400 the following day.

There is an important caveat: Slovenia’s registry itself has not claimed that the entire increase was caused by Trump, and Hostinger’s data suggests that not every newly registered domain is directly related to AI. Still, the surge in registrations is real.

Could .si Become the New .ai?

This is where things get particularly interesting.

Today, when we see company.ai, we rarely think about Anguilla. We automatically read .ai as Artificial Intelligence. A country-code domain has effectively acquired a second identity and become a global technology brand.

If Super Intelligence really starts being shortened to SI not only by U.S. officials but also by startups, investors, developers, and the media, the same effect could theoretically emerge around .si.

agent.si, build.si, work.si, automate.si — today, these are simply Slovenian domains. But in a world of SI agents, SI platforms, and SI automation, those addresses could suddenly be perceived very differently.

There is, of course, an important difference between Anguilla and Slovenia. .ai domains are more expensive, the registries operate under different structures, and a surge in .si registrations does not mean the Slovenian government will automatically start collecting tens of millions of dollars the way Anguilla did. So it would be premature to say that SI is already “funding Slovenia.”

But the question is now a legitimate one: if SI really becomes a widely accepted technology term, how valuable could Slovenia’s country-code domain become?

And There’s One More Perfect Coincidence

Slovenia is Melania Trump’s country of birth.

That creates an almost perfect internet story. Donald Trump’s administration starts promoting the term Super Intelligence. Its abbreviation is SI. The .si domain belongs to Slovenia. And Slovenia happens to be the country where the First Lady was born.

There is, of course, no evidence that this coincidence had anything to do with the choice of terminology. But the sequence itself is almost too perfect: the AI boom unexpectedly generated enormous revenue for a tiny Caribbean territory, and now terminology introduced by the Trump administration has already triggered increased interest in the domain of his wife’s home country.

We still don’t know whether SI will stick. A few months from now, everyone may still be saying AI, while the current rush for .si domains becomes little more than an interesting chapter in the history of domain speculation. But if Super Intelligence really does become a widely used term, Slovenia could unexpectedly find itself with its own version of the phenomenon that made .ai so valuable to Anguilla.

And that would make for a wonderfully strange story about the economics of technology: sometimes, you don’t need to build an AI model or a data center to profit from the next technology boom. Sometimes, you just need your country to have been assigned the right two letters decades ago.

AI had Anguilla. Maybe SI will have Slovenia.