The artificial intelligence boom has benefited chatbot makers, computer scientists and Nvidia investors. It's also providing an unusual windfall for Anguilla, a tiny island in the Caribbean.
ChatGPT's debut nearly two years ago heralded the dawn of the AI age and kicked off a digital gold rush as companies scrambled to stake their own claims by acquiring websites that end in .ai.
That's where Anguilla comes in. The British territory was allotted control of the .ai internet address in the 1990s. It was one of hundreds of obscure top-level domains assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names. While the domains are supposed to indicate a website has a link to a particular region or language, it's not always a requirement.
Google uses google.ai to showcase its artificial intelligence services while Elon Musk uses x.ai as the homepage for his Grok AI chatbot. Startups like AI search engine Perplexity have also snapped up .ai web addresses, redirecting users from the .com version.
Anguilla's earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled last year to $32 million, fueled by the surging interest in AI. The income now accounts for about 20% of Anguilla's total government revenue. Before the AI boom, it hovered at about 5%.
Anguilla's government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee every time a .ai web address is renewed, Identity Digital Chief Strategy Officer Ram Mohan said the fee — $140 for two years — won't change. It also gets paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites fetched tens of thousands of dollars.
The money directly boosts the economy of Anguilla, which is just 35 square miles and has a population of about 16,000. Blessed with coral reefs, clear waters and palm-fringed white sand beaches, the island is a haven for uber-wealthy tourists. Still, many residents are underprivileged and tourism has been battered by the pandemic and, before that, a powerful hurricane.
Anguilla doesn't have its own AI industry, though Premier Ellis Webster hopes that one day it will become an hub for the technology. He said it was just luck that it was Anguilla, and not nearby Antigua, that was assigned the .ai domain in 1995 because both places had those letters in their names.
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Webster said the money takes the pressure off government finances and helps fund key projects, but cautioned that "we can't rely on it solely."
"You can't predict how long this is going to last," Webster said in an interview with the AP. "And so I don't want to have our economy and our country and all our programs just based on this. And then all of a sudden there's a new fad comes up in the next year or two, and then we are left now having to make significant expenditure cuts, removing programs."
To help keep up with the explosive growth in domain registrations, Anguilla said Tuesday it will sign a deal with a U.S.-based domain management company, Identity Digital, to help manage the effort. They said the agreement will mean more revenue for the government while improving the resilience and security of the web addresses.
Identity Digital, which also manages Australia's .au domain, expects to migrate all .ai domain services to its systems by the start of next year, Mohan said in an interview.
A local software entrepreneur previously helped Anguilla set up its registry system decades earlier.
There are now more than 533,000 .ai web domains, an increase of more than 10-fold since 2018. The International Monetary Fund said in a May report that the earnings will help diversify the economy, "thus making it more resilient to external shocks.
Webster expects domain-related revenues to rise further, and could even double this year from last year's $32 million.
He said the money will finance the airport's expansion, free medical care for senior citizens and completion of a vocational technology training center at Anguilla's high school.
The income also provides "budget support" for other projects the government is eyeing, such as a national development fund it could quickly tap for hurricane recovery efforts. The island normally relies on assistance from its administrative power, Britain, which comes with conditions, Webster said.
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Countries that have cashed in on their top-level domain names
LONDON — Anguilla is raking in extra revenue from registration fees for its .ai web domain thanks to the artificial intelligence boom, but it's not the only place cashing in on demand for websites with distinctive address endings.
Here's a look at some other places cashing in on their unique top-level domains:
TUVALU
Tuvalu is a string of coral atolls, scattered over hundreds of miles in the Pacific Ocean, located midway between Australia and Hawaii. It has one of the world's smallest economies and its low-lying islands are vulnerable to climate change, but it does have a very valuable resource: the .tv web domain. Royalties from .tv, which web users might assume is short for television, have been climbing, especially after videogame streaming platform Twitch licensed the web address twitch.tv.
LIBYA
The North African country, which has been plagued by turmoil since longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi's death in 2011, isn't readily associated with internet culture. But Libya controls web addresses that end in .ly, which have become widely used as a so-called domain hack for websites with English names that end in -ly. Well-known examples include bit.ly, used by the weblink shortening service Bitly, and parse.ly, the website for online analytics platform Parse.ly.
MONTENEGRO
This Balkan country became an independent nation after the breakup of Yugoslavia. It's one of Europe's smaller countries — about 620,000 people — bordered by the Adriatic Sea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia and Albania. Montenegro was assigned the .me web domain, which has become popular with people who want to claim their pronoun for personal branding.
Websites ending in .me are "often used for personal websites, portfolios, blogs and online resumes or portfolios because 'me' can be seen as a way to personalize an online presence," website builder Wix says.
COLOMBIA
Websites that end in .co aren't from a generic web domain for companies, like .com sites. The .co domain is assigned to Colombia, but the South American country allows anyone to sign up for its web addresses. Internet registrar GoDaddy says more than 2 million .co web domains have been claimed, including addresses claimed by Big Tech names like Amazon which uses it to redirect online shoppers to its .com home page. Google, meanwhile, informs visitors to g.co that the link is it's official shortcut.