If you guessed right it’s ‘AI’ and Anguilla.

The TLDR and Fun Facts:
The local Anguillan government has netted a tidy profit from the registrations of “.ai” ccTLD domains akin to striking ‘digital oil’ due to the stratospheric demand driving exponential growth since 2022-23.

They’re in the driving seat and there’s no sign of slowing down. Because domains in general technically leased we don’t own them outright, that’s good news for Anguilla as a recurring bi-annual profit and hedge.
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For context; In 2019 profit from .ai registrations was $2.9m USD around ~1% of their income. In 2025 this was touted at $93m USD, ~47% of income.
Now registrations are the territory’s number one revenue source and expected to grow again.

The cost is approximately $140 USD for a two year lease up from $100 USD. This varies per registrar, provider or locality additional taxes may apply. Namecheap is great value at £68.97 per year & Cloudflare represents great value at $80 per year both require a two year lease so £138.04 & $160 respectively. Honourable mentions go to 20i, GoDaddy and AWS Route53 who added .ai support back in January this year. Always do currency checks and apply tax for a true comparison.

And while $140 USD can seem a lot. Breathe a sigh of relief as, some domains like ‘you.ai’ were purchased for hundreds of thousands reportedly $700,000.00 by Dharmesh Shah Co-Founder of hubspot. Who also purchased OS.ai and previously chat.com which was sold to OpenAI.

Right now there are currently more than 1m .ai domains in the wild and this could rise to to 1.5m in 2026. For reference In 2023. There were around 400,000.

For a country that previously did not have this tap ‘turned on’, that’s a stellar return. Personally I am happy for the Anguillans and I hope there day to lives are improved and increased by this and that the money set aside for potential natural disasters serves them well. At least there’s an additional nugget of good when you purchase an .ai domain.

From a pure self interested economic perspective there should be clearer rules and transparency to govern price so they don’t get out of control, in that respect is this asset any different to to Oil/OPEC – what do you think?

If you want to know about where to register your domains for upcoming ai projects, considering transferring away from a registrar or want the best bang for you buck on established domains like .com, .biz, .co.uk get in touch.