The A.I.

Boom Makes Millions for an

Unlikely Industry Player: Anguilla
The small Caribbean territory brought in $32 million last year, more than 10 percent of
its G.D.P., from companies registering web addresses that end in .ai.

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For each domain registration, Anguilla’s government gets anywhere from $140 to
thousands of dollars from website names sold at auctions.Credit...Eric Rojas for The
New York Times
By Emma Bubola
March 22, 2024

Artificial intelligence’s integration into everyday life has stirred up doubts and
unsettling questions for many about humanity’s path forward. But in Anguilla, a tiny
Caribbean island to the east of Puerto Rico, the A.I. boom has made the country a
fortune.

The British territory collects a fee from every registration for internet addresses that end
in “.ai,” which happens to be the domain name assigned to the island, like “.fr” for
France and “.jp” for Japan. With companies wanting internet addresses that
communicate they are at the forefront of the A.I. boom — like Elon Musk’s X.ai website
for his artificial intelligence company — Anguilla has recently received a huge influx in
requests for domain names.

For each domain registration, Anguilla’s government gets anywhere from $140 to
thousands of dollars from website names sold at auctions, according government data.
Last year, Anguilla’s government made about $32 million from those fees. That
amounted to more than 10 percent of gross domestic product for the territory of almost
16,000 people and 35 square miles.

“Some people call it a windfall,” Anguilla’s premier, Ellis Webster, said. “We just call it
God smiling down on us.”
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Mr. Webster said the government used the money to provide free health care for citizens
70 and older, and it has committed millions of dollars to finish building a school and a
vocational training center. The government has also allocated funds to improve its
airport; doubled its budget for sports activities, events and facilities; and increased the
budget for citizens seeking medical treatment overseas, he said.

The island, which relies heavily on tourism, had been hard hit by the pandemic’s
restrictions on travel and a devastating hurricane in 2017. The .ai domain income was
the boost the country needed.
“We never thought that it would have this potential,” Mr. Webster said.

Anguilla’s control of .ai dates back to the early days of the internet, when nations and
territories were assigned their slice of cyberspace. Anguilla received .ai, and its
government, whose own site is www.gov.ai., did not make much of it until the domain
names started bringing in millions. Officials are uncertain how long the boon will last,
but they predicted 2024 would bring in similar income as last year from domain names.

It is not the first bonanza to make a big difference to a grateful domain owner. Tuvalu, a
string of islands northwest of Australia, sold the rights to its suffix, “.tv,” to a Canadian
entrepreneur for $50 million, and used the money to put electricity on the outer islands,
create scholarships and finance the process to join the United Nations.

The South Pacific island of Niue, on the other hand, gave an American businessman the
rights to its “.nu” suffix in the 1990s in exchange for connecting it to the internet. The
island later claimed to have been cheated out of cash that came through the sale of the
domain name to thousands of Scandinavians attracted by the suffix “nu,” which means
“now” in Swedish, Danish and Dutch.