One Trump post triggered a rush on Slovenia's .si domain. Slovenia will earn exactly nothing.

US President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on 19 September that the term artificial intelligence is not accurate enough, and proposed new terms: Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, Supreme Intelligence. He left the vote to his followers.

"Many people think that the words "Artificial Intelligence" are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence. A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or..."

The abbreviation SI won. At the United Nations General Assembly, Trump then announced that all official US documents would from now on use the term "super intelligence, SI", and expressed hope that the rest of the world would follow his example.

The abbreviation matched the two letters of Slovenia's national domain. The same thing happened in 2022 with the .ai domain, which belongs to Anguilla, a Caribbean island with 16,000 residents. In 2024 the Anguilla government earned €34 million from selling domain names, and the number of websites on .ai grew from 50,000 to 850,000 in five years. Now a similar fate is supposedly about to befall Slovenia.

The figures from Register.si, which manages the .si domain under the public institute Arnes, are unambiguous. On Wednesday, 23 September, they recorded more than 4,000 new registrations in a single day, more than in the whole of August (3,515). When checked on 25 September, the official counter on the registry's website showed 206,419 registered domains and 3,897 new ones in the previous 24 hours, almost as many as Slovenia has so far registered in an average month.

Except that what Slovenia is left with is the rush, not the money. Register.si has stated that the state will earn nothing from the increased interest, because prices are set by registrars, not by the registry itself.

"Speculation in the media about 'Slovenia's million-euro earnings due to increased interest in .si' therefore has no real basis. However, we do advise owners of trademarks, slogans, company names ... who do not yet have a .si domain to register one as soon as possible." (translated)

While the registry is silent about earnings, registrars hide nothing. The domain provider Neoserv sent its customers an email these days stating that the number of .si registrations has in recent days risen to roughly twenty times the usual average, and advising them to secure a domain before someone else grabs it.

"If you do not yet have a .SI domain for your company or brand, or you have a short, catchy name in mind, do not wait. Check the availability of a .SI domain at NEOSERV and secure it before someone else takes it." (translated)

To be more convincing, the company even uses the same comparison we use in this article: that .si could be the next .ai, a domain that once belonged only to the Caribbean island of Anguilla and is now a synonym for artificial intelligence. The only difference is that this time the comparison is made by someone who will actually earn money from the rush on .si.

The registration price is the same for all registrars: €10, regardless of who buys the domain and why. Anguilla earned so much from .ai because it runs the registry itself and sets its own prices. Slovenia leaves this business to ninety private registrars, and the state keeps the same ten euros that a neighbour pays when registering a domain for a carpentry workshop.

So who is actually buying these domains, if not Slovenian carpenters? The US domain industry publication Domain Name Wire reviewed 35 sales of .si domains from January to early June this year and found that the vast majority were trades between investors, not companies that would actually use the domain. In nine of the thirteen June sales, the buyer was the same investor from China, who accounts for 43 percent of all publicly known sales this year. The end users are identifiable only for the domains Recursive.si, bought for $20,000 by the US artificial intelligence company Recursive, and Military.si, bought for $1,795 by a Polish company that owns the shop Militaria.

In other words: speculators are currently selling domains to each other and waiting for a buyer willing to pay the right price. The same happened with the .ai domain before ChatGPT arrived, and with the .io domain before everything else arrived.

Incidentally, this newsroom also lives on a .si domain. If Trump has hit the jackpot, we own a share of a gold mine. At ten euros a year, until it expires.