A tiny island with a population of 10,000 earns 70 million US dollars a year relying on .ai.

Amid the artificial intelligence boom in recent years, the most unexpected winner is likely Anguilla, a British island territory famous for beach vacations, which is 6,000 kilometers away from Silicon Valley, has a population of only 15,000 (fewer than that of a single residential compound in Beijing).

Source: Official website of the Government of Anguilla

You may not be familiar with Anguilla, but you must have come across many websites ending with .ai in recent years, such as Claude.ai, Perplexity.ai, Character.ai and so on. With the upsurge of AI startups, .ai domain names have also been growing in popularity. According to statistics from Domain Name Stat, a domain name tracking website, the number of websites ending with .ai has exceeded 1 million as of January 2026.

The number of websites ending with .ai has exceeded 1 million | Source: Sherwood

And .ai is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Anguilla. In accordance with local regulations, Anguilla charges domain name owners a registration fee of 140 USD every two years, and 90% of the domain names will be renewed upon expiration, which brings a stable and substantial cash flow to Anguilla. It is estimated that this business generated at least over 70 million USD in revenue for Anguilla last year, and the figure is expected to exceed 90 million USD this year. Even in the 2026 government budget report, the Premier of Anguilla explicitly stated that "domain name registration revenues continue to outperform expectations."

I. Unexpected Windfall, Originated From an "Accident" 30 Years Ago

Many people may wonder, how could such a high-quality suffix as .ai end up in the hands of a small island nation?

This dates back to the 1990s, when the Internet was still in its nascent dial-up era. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is responsible for allocating country code top-level domains to more than 200 countries and regions around the world. This organization manually assigns a unique two-letter code to each country in accordance with the ISO 3166-1 standard.

For example, China was assigned .cn, South Korea .kr, and Anguilla .ai. After that, each country would independently formulate its own rules, such as registration eligibility, pricing, regulatory policies and so on. Back in the dial-up Internet era, .ai was as insignificant as a free gift, and no one could have imagined that these two simple letters would become a hard currency in the tech circle decades later.

II. Why Has This Special Domain Name Become a Highly Sought-After Asset?

The domain name is essentially the address plus brand entry in the Internet world.

A good domain name is as valuable as a rare in-game ID or a premium phone number, because a "good address" is unique and scarce in the digital world. In the past, the most common choice for enterprises was various domain names ending with .com. But in recent years, AI has become a core keyword for startups, and related domain name registration and transactions have also become increasingly frequent.

First, AI as a keyword still enjoys traffic dividends at present. Second, the .ai domain name itself sends a clear message: "I am not engaged in traditional business, I am in the AI industry." Driven by the technology trend, .ai has evolved from a geographical identifier to a digital totem, which leads to the aforementioned sharp surge in the number of .ai domain names.

In September last year, the domain name you.ai was sold at a high price of 700,000 USD. Although there is still a gap compared with the sky-high transactions of .com domain names that often reach tens of millions of USD, it is enough to demonstrate the attention that entrepreneurs and speculators are paying to this field. The Government of Anguilla is naturally delighted to see the rising popularity of .ai domain names. No matter how people rush to register or trade these domain names, it only needs to collect the 140 USD registration fee every two years, which perfectly interprets the "easy-win economics".

III. Anguilla Is Not the First Country to Get Rich From Domain Names

In fact, Anguilla is not the first to earn foreign exchange through domain names. Before it, many countries and regions have turned their own country code top-level domains into "digital money printers".

Tuvalu, a small island country in the South Pacific, relied on the .tv suffix which is naturally associated with "television", and its annual domain name rental revenue once accounted for 10% of the island's total GDP. More legendarily, in 2000, it was precisely with this sum of money that they paid the membership fees for joining the United Nations. For an island country with a population of only over 10,000, .tv is simply a lifeline bestowed by heaven.

After emerging from the economic hardship following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Montenegro achieved a remarkable transformation relying on the highly personalized .me domain name. The word "me" perfectly fits the positioning of personal brands, blogs and social media. Nowadays, .me has become the preferred domain name for personal blogs and creative projects, and Montenegro has instantly become a popular name in the domain name industry.

Of course, there are also countries that are not willing to earn this sum of money. For example, Australia (.au) and Canada (.ca) strictly restrict that only local entities can register their domain names. These countries value the "national identifier" attribute of domain names more, rather than treating them as commodities. But countries like Anguilla obviously have a more pragmatic attitude: the national identifier is too intangible, and putting US dollars into their pockets is the real priority. After all, for a small island with a tourism-dominated economy and weak economic foundation, this unexpected windfall is extremely attractive.

Closing Remarks

The times sometimes reward some unexpected winners. Anguilla, for example, has barely done anything, but just luckily won a "domain name lottery" 30 years ago.

While AI companies are struggling with computing power costs and business models, this small Caribbean island only needs to wait for domain name renewal payments to arrive. As technological waves advance forward, the truly stable revenue sometimes does not come from the most cutting-edge innovations, but from an inconspicuous positional advantage in the underlying rules.

Perhaps when people look back on this round of AI boom years later, what they remember is not only the competition between different AI models, but also how a country with almost no AI engineers has become the most calm and laid-back winning spectator of this era by relying on ".ai".

References:

There are now more than 1 million “.ai” websites, contributing an estimated $70 million to Anguilla’s government revenue last year，Sherwood

Why domain names have unexpectedly become a cash cow for small countries, XPIN

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Baijing Chuhai" (ID: baijingapp), written by Li Shuang, edited by Yin Guanxiao, and published with authorization from 36Kr.