The small Caribbean island of Anguilla has an asset that has suddenly proven enormously valuable: a two-letter internet domain, .ai. Originally, the abbreviation simply stood for Anguilla Island. But as the global artificial intelligence boom took hold, those same letters came to mean artificial intelligence, and thousands of tech companies from around the world rushed to register their websites in the Anguillan domain zone. The island itself is tiny: 91 square kilometres, 18,000 inhabitants, an economy traditionally built on tourism. No major tech companies, no data centres, no start-ups.
Numbers that speak for themselves
The growth has been staggering. At the end of 2022, just over 100,000 domains were registered in the .ai zone. By mid-2023, that figure had already reached 350,000, and by mid-2025 — 850,000. Today the counter has passed 1.2 million, and it keeps climbing by several thousand every day.
Revenue has grown in lockstep. In 2022, before the AI frenzy took off, the island earned $7.7 million from domain sales. In 2024, that figure jumped to $39 million. In 2025 — more than $85 million. Registration prices start at $150–200, but the most sought-after addresses, think you.ai or cloud.ai, sell at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To put the scale in perspective: $85 million split among 18,000 residents works out to nearly $4,700 per person per year. Purely from selling domain names. Without a single factory, office, or line of code written on the island itself. The domain business now brings in almost as much as tourism, a sector that once accounted for 37% of GDP. The island’s total GDP, which barely exceeded $300 million in 2022, had grown to $456 million by 2024.
How not to miss your moment: the Tuvalu lesson
History offers a cautionary tale of a similar opportunity squandered. In the late 1990s, the Pacific atoll of Tuvalu, owner of the .tv domain, handed over its rights to VeriSign for just two million dollars a year. When online video exploded, that sum turned out to be, in the words of Tuvalu’s own officials, “pennies.” Payments were later nudged up to five million a year, but renegotiating the contract in any meaningful way was no longer an option.
Anguilla’s authorities appear to have learned from that mistake. In 2024, they signed a five-year agreement with the American company Identity Digital, which specialises in domain name registries. Identity Digital handles sales and subscription billing, keeping around 10% of revenues as its commission — everything else flows into the island’s treasury.
