For most of the past year, Slovenia’s official web domain registrar has recorded just around a thousand new registrations a month. That’s to be expected—after all, the small Eastern European country is home to only 2.1 million people.
But last week, after U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the portal received more than 6,000 registrations in just two days.
For most of the past year, Slovenia’s official web domain registrar has recorded just around a thousand new registrations a month. That’s to be expected—after all, the small Eastern European country is home to only 2.1 million people.
But last week, after U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the portal received more than 6,000 registrations in just two days.
During a riff about global efforts to govern artificial intelligence, Trump said he was changing the technology’s name to “super intelligence” in all official U.S. documents. “The use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence … sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” he said. “In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence—SI,” he added. “It sounds much better, it is much better, and it’s more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power.”
It just so happens that Slovenia, where U.S. first lady Melania Trump is from, owns and operates the “.si” domain name.
The impact was immediate. More than 2,000 new websites were registered using the “.si” domain name on the day of Trump’s speech and more than 4,000 the day after, according to data shared by the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES), which oversees the country’s domain registration portal. That brought the number of domain registrations in September to over 10,000 and pushed the overall number of web domains registered with the country past 200,000 for the first time ever.
As of Tuesday morning local time, the number of registered domains was around 219,800, with roughly 4,000 new registrations in the previous 24 hours alone, ARNES spokesperson Klara Herman told Foreign Policy via email. “We would, however, be careful about attributing the entire increase to President Trump’s comments. The upward trend was already there before the recent attention around ‘SI,’” Herman added. “What we can say is that the international discussion around the term has coincided with an exceptional additional surge in interest.”
Register.si, the portal run by ARNES, does not give out the domains itself; it only records registrations made by roughly 90 domestic and foreign registrars, for which it charges 10 euros per registration. “The final price for domain holders depends on the policy of the individual registrar, and Register.si has no influence on it,” the portal said in a statement posted online. “In any case, we advise holders of trademarks, slogans, companies … who do not yet have a domain under .si to register it as soon as possible.”
At least one registrar is already cashing in. Hostinger, a web domain provider headquartered in Lithuania, is advertising “.si” domains on its websites at a discounted rate of $11.99 for the first year and $16.99 thereafter. “AI is now called superintelligence. Register your .si domain,” one advertisement reads.
Klaudijus Januitis, Hostinger’s head of domains, told Foreign Policy via email that the company started offering “.si” webpages on Sept. 23, the day after Trump’s speech. “Nearly all of our .si orders are new registrations, not transfers from other providers,” Januitis said. “People aren’t moving existing websites. They’re claiming new names while the good ones are still available.”
Hostinger also has a first-year discount for “.ai” domains (which belong to the British overseas territory of Anguilla), charging $89.99 initially and $109.99 thereafter.
As Bloomberg reported in 2023, Anguilla—which was assigned the domain “.ai” by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a global nonprofit that manages web domain registrations—has made a killing off the surge in demand for “.ai” websites after the 2022 launch of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT thrust AI into the global lexicon overnight. The island made around $32 million off domain registrations in 2023, according to the International Monetary Fund, accounting for more than 20 percent of the government’s annual revenue. Purchases of “.ai” domains on GoDaddy, one of the most popular private registrars, have increased by 2,000 percent in the past eight years, the company says on its website.