The tiny Caribbean nation of Anguilla has found a lucrative side-gig in the business of letting artificial intelligence (AI) companies use its .ai domain code for their websites.
Officials in Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory about 230 miles east of Puerto Rico, are boasting that the little island’s revenue has grown “by leaps and bounds” after selling domain registrations to overseas tech firms.
Haydn Hughes, Anguilla’s minister of tourism and infrastructure, told Fox Business that it was “totally incidental” that the country was granted the .ai domain code in 1995 from the International Telecommunication Union.
“At that time, we didn’t have computers in Anguilla, we didn’t have any modern technology in Anguilla in 1995, and so we didn’t have email addresses, we didn’t have internet. So, artificial intelligence was something that was far removed from our cerebral cortex,” Hughes explained.
“As time progressed, we saw the potential with this administration that I’m a part of. It’s a very young administration,” he told the outlet. “We have ministers who are really tech-savvy, and so we’ve been able to monetize this, and it’s great for the island, and we’ve been able to invest in a significant amount of physical and social infrastructure.”
There were about 100,000 registered .ai domains in 2021, which quickly rose to 354,000 by 2023 after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other popular AI programs.
The domain registrations went from contributing to 4 percent of the Anguillan government’s revenue in 2019 to more than 20 percent in 2023, officials stated.
This added up to around $32 million in revenue in 2023.
“With the advent of artificial intelligence as it is, it has made .ai very attractive, and so we have been growing in terms of our revenue generation from .ai by leaps and bounds,” Hughes said.
On an island of just about 15,000 people, the minister said this money goes a long way. Part of the increased income has gone to a senior healthcare program, as well as into the country’s public school system.
”One of the things that is really great about it is that those persons who have never heard of Anguilla now know of Anguilla,” Hughes added. “And especially when persons come to Anguilla to see what this .ai rave is about, they are quite amazed to see all of the offerings that we have in terms of our hospitality, in terms of our restaurants, our hotels, our villas.”
Anguilla is not the only tiny country to experience this phenomenon, with the South Pacific island of Tuvalu making an estimated $10 million a year from its contract with web hosting company GoDaddy to lease out its .tv domain code.
