You don’t need a chip factory or a sovereign wealth fund to profit from the AI boom.
Sometimes, you just need a two-letter domain.
Anguilla, a 35-square-mile British territory in the Caribbean with about 15,000 residents, is projected to make over $100 million in 2024 from leasing its country-code top-level domain: .ai.
That’s not revenue from AI innovation.
It’s just from letting the world rent names like neural.ai, startup.ai, or literallyanything.ai.
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The math isn’t fuzzy.
At $140 per 2-year registration and over 600,000 active domains, Anguilla is collecting millions annually.
In 2023, .ai brought in roughly $32 million.
By the end of 2024, it may surpass 70% of the government’s total operating revenue.
This isn’t a side hustle. It’s digital resource extraction.
And it raises a real question: what happens when the infrastructure of the internet assigns accidental economic power to tiny jurisdictions?
The domain name system was never meant to generate this kind of geopolitical arbitrage.
It just happened. .tv belongs to Tuvalu.
.io to the British Indian Ocean Territory. .me to Montenegro.
.ly to Libya.
Each country, intentionally or not, became a brand broker to the global tech economy.
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But Anguilla’s .ai isn’t just a cute branding win.
It’s a meaningful revenue engine.
The government has paid down public debt, expanded airport infrastructure, invested in hospitals and public internet access, and modernized core services.
It is, for now, a national dividend on the global obsession with artificial intelligence.
Unlike oil, it doesn’t run out. But unlike oil, it’s also fragile.
Demand could plateau. ICANN could eventually reassign the namespace. Registrars could push for price compression. Private registries could move more aggressively into pseudo-.ai territory (.tech, .app, .xyz, etc.).
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There are also governance risks.
Until recently, Anguilla ran .ai internally. As of 2025, registry operations are outsourced to Identity Digital, a U.S.-based domain infrastructure company.
Anguilla still profits—but it introduces more intermediaries, more opacity, and more potential for dependency.
If Identity Digital ever leverages pricing, policy, or platform power to renegotiate revenue shares, Anguilla could find itself suddenly disempowered over its most valuable asset.
For IP lawyers, this isn’t just a trivia fact. It’s a real-world case study in how infrastructure, trademarks, and jurisdiction interact.
Every .ai domain is governed by contract, but those contracts rest on sovereign naming rights delegated through internet governance structures that were never built to carry this much capital.
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More fundamentally, it’s a question of digital sovereignty.
Anguilla didn’t invent AI. It doesn’t lead in machine learning, infrastructure, or talent. But it controls the namespace the world wants to inhabit. And for now, it’s monetizing that accident with rare efficiency.
Call it rent-seeking. Call it smart governance. Call it domain colonialism in reverse. Whatever it is, it’s working.
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.AI domain name owner 👊🏼🔥 So true!