In recent years of the artificial intelligence boom, perhaps the most unexpected winner is a small British island known for beach vacations—located 6,000 kilometers from Silicon Valley, with a population of only 15,000, fewer than a single residential compound in Beijing. That island is Anguilla.

You may not be familiar with Anguilla, but you have certainly encountered many websites ending in .ai in recent years. Examples include Claude.ai, Perplexity.ai, and Character.ai. As the wave of AI startups took off, .ai domains surged in popularity. According to statistics from the domain tracking site Domain Name Stat, as of January 2026, the number of websites ending in .ai had surpassed one million.

Since .ai is Anguilla's country code top-level domain, under local regulations, Anguilla collects a registration fee of $140 from owners every two years, and about 90% of domains are renewed upon expiration. This provides Anguilla with a stable and substantial cash flow. It is estimated that this business brought Anguilla at least over $70 million in revenue last year, and this year it is expected to exceed $90 million. Even in the 2026 government budget report, the Premier of Anguilla remarked that "domain registration revenue continues to exceed expectations."

A Windfall That Began with a 30-Year-Old "Accident"

Many people may wonder how such a desirable suffix as .ai ended up in the hands of an island. This traces back to the 1990s, when the internet was still in the chaotic era of dial-up connections. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is responsible for assigning country domains to over 200 countries and regions worldwide. Following the ISO 3166-1 standard, it manually assigns unique two-letter codes to each country. For example, China received .cn, South Korea received .kr, and Anguilla received .ai. Each country then determines its own rules, such as who can register, the pricing, and regulatory policies. In that dial-up era, .ai was as humble as a freebie, and no one could have imagined that two simple letters would become hard currency in the tech world decades later.

Why Has This Special Domain Become So Coveted?

A domain name is essentially an address and brand entry point in the internet world. A good domain is like a good in-game ID or a premium phone number—it sells for a high price because a "good address" is equally unique and scarce in the digital world. In the past, the most common choice for businesses was domains ending in .com, but in recent years, as AI became a key buzzword for startups, domain registrations and transactions related to it have intensified. First, AI as a keyword still enjoys traffic dividends. Second, an .ai domain itself sends a message: "I am not in a traditional business—I am in AI." Driven by tech trends, .ai has transformed from a geographic identifier into a digital totem. This explains the surge in .ai domains mentioned earlier. Last September, a domain called you.ai sold for $700,000. Although it still falls short of the multi-million-dollar .com transactions, it is enough to show the attention entrepreneurs and speculators are paying to this space. The Anguillian government is naturally pleased to see the popularity of .ai domains. No matter how people snap them up or trade them, it simply collects a $140 registration fee every two years—a perfect example of "effortless economics."

Anguilla Is Not the First to Prosper from Domain Names

Anguilla is not the first to earn foreign exchange through domain names. Before it, several countries and regions had already turned their country code top-level domains into "digital money printers." Tuvalu is a small island nation in the South Pacific. Thanks to the naturally fitting .tv suffix for "television," the domain rental income once accounted for 10% of the island's GDP. More remarkably, in 2000, they used this money to pay off their dues to join the United Nations. For an island nation with a population of just over ten thousand, .tv was truly a lifeline gifted by fate. Montenegro emerged from the hardship following the breakup of Yugoslavia and made a stunning transformation with the .me domain, which carries a personalized touch. "Me" perfectly matches the tone of personal branding, blogs, and social media. Today, .me has become the preferred domain for personal blogs and creative projects, and Montenegro has reinvented itself as a domain industry darling. Of course, some countries disdain this income. Australia (.au) and Canada (.ca), for example, strictly limit registration to domestic entities only. These countries value the "national identity" attribute of their domains rather than treating them as commodities. But countries like Anguilla clearly take a more pragmatic view: national identity is too abstract—getting the dollars into your pocket is what truly matters. After all, for a small island with a tourism-based economy and a weak economic foundation, this windfall income is simply too good to pass up.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes the era rewards unexpected winners. Anguilla, for instance, did almost nothing—it just happened to scratch a "domain lottery ticket" 30 years ago. While AI companies struggle with computing costs and business models, this small Caribbean island simply waits for domain renewal payments to arrive. As the technological wave surges forward, the truly stable returns sometimes do not come from the most cutting-edge innovation, but from an inconspicuous positional advantage within underlying rules. Perhaps years from now, looking back at this AI boom, people will remember not only the battle of models, but also how a country with virtually no AI engineers became the most relaxed bystander winner of this era through ".ai."

Reference articles: There are now more than 1 million ".ai" websites, contributing an estimated $70 million to Anguilla's government revenue last year, Sherwood; Domain names—how did they become cash cows for small nations?, Cha Ping X.PIN