❯ After Trump renames AI “super intelligence”, Slovenia’s .si registrations jump from about 2,000 to 44,000 in September

More than twentyfold in a monthSlovenia’s domain registry, Registry SI, says about 44,000 new .si domains were registered in September, against about 2,000 in August, an increase of roughly 2,199%. According to the BBC and TechCrunch, 11,000 were added on September 30 alone, followed by nearly 13,000 in the next 24 hours.

A rush set off by an executive order.si is Slovenia’s country domain. On September 29, Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to refer to “AI” and “artificial intelligence” as “SI” and “super intelligence”, and tech companies and speculators began grabbing addresses ending in .si. Domain seller Hostinger says .si briefly became the second most popular extension on its platform after .com, with more than half of buyers from the US and India.

Like .ai, but less lucrativeThe episode recalls .ai, which belongs to the Caribbean island of Anguilla and earned millions of dollars from the AI boom. But .si costs only about $12 a year at Hostinger, while .ai costs about $90 a year with a two-year minimum. Hostinger’s head of domains said the revenue goes to the registry, not the government, and that “Slovenia will not see what Anguilla saw.”

Mostly stockpilingReports say only about 3% of newly registered .si domains are explicitly related to artificial intelligence. Most of the rest were grabbed to be resold, and resales have already exceeded $1 million. Whether the new term will catch on outside government documents is uncertain, and the people paying now are betting that it will.

▪ SIGNALA term the industry has not yet accepted already has a domain business built around it, because speculators react to policy signals far faster than the industry itself.