The AI Boom Is Funding a Caribbean Island Two Letters at a Time

Anguilla did not build an artificial intelligence model. It did not raise venture capital or hire researchers. In the 1980s, it was assigned two letters by an international standards body: .ai. The island has been collecting a fee on the AI industry ever since.

The .ai suffix is Anguilla’s country code domain, assigned decades before AI became a trillion-dollar commercial race. Every startup, lab and enterprise product that registers a .ai address pays the British Overseas Territory a fee. According to Semafor, Anguilla generated $39 million selling its domain last year, nearly a quarter of the island’s total revenue. Focus reported that the island earned the equivalent of $85.3 million from .ai registrations in 2025, far exceeding government projections.

Registrants include some of the most recognized names in AI: perplexity.ai, claude.ai, x.ai and meta.ai. Every one of them routes a fee to an island of 16,000 people with no tech sector to speak of.

Windfall Written in Two Letters

The .ai domain’s value was negligible for most of its existence. Domaintechnik, an accredited .ai registrar, found that revenue from .ai domains rose from approximately $2.9 million in 2018 to $39 million in 2024, reaching $93 million in 2025. The jump tracks almost exactly with the commercial AI boom that followed the release of large language models. The domain surpassed 1 million registered addresses at the turn of 2026, with roughly 2,000 new registrations per day in January.

Identity Digital, the U.S. company that manages the .ai registry on Anguilla’s behalf, found that 28% of all newly founded tech startups now use a .ai domain. The aftermarket reflects the same demand. Bot.ai sold for $1.2 million in February, the highest publicly known .ai domain sale, according to Domaintechnik.

Technology Minister José Vanterpool told the BBC that .ai was expected to generate nearly half of government revenue in 2025. Anguilla’s leadership has tied the proceeds to airport expansion, road construction, tax relief and expanded health services. Anguilla Focus noted that the 2026 budget recorded a surplus largely driven by non-tax revenue from .ai domain sales.

Precedent From the Pacific

The dynamic is not entirely new. Semafor reported that the Pacific island of Tuvalu went through the same thing two decades ago with its .tv domain, which became valuable as streaming platforms proliferated. Tuvalu licensed .tv to a private company and used the proceeds to fund public services. Anguilla’s arrangement works similarly — Identity Digital manages the .ai registry on Anguilla’s behalf, with revenues flowing back to the government.

The comparison has limits. Tuvalu’s .tv windfall faded as streaming platforms consolidated and domain prestige mattered less. Anguilla’s position depends on whether .ai retains its association with artificial intelligence as the industry matures. So far, that association has only strengthened. The largest AI companies in the world use .ai addresses as product identifiers, not just domain names. For as long as that holds, a small Caribbean island will collect a fee every time someone registers one.

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