The tiny Caribbean island sitting on a digital 'goldmine'

The Caribbean nation of Anguilla is a "small island with a big secret", said Skift. It holds "one of the most lucrative pieces of digital real estate in the world": the website domain name .ai.

When the internet was first carved into country codes in the 1980s, laying the "groundwork for the digital era", no one could have imagined that "two little letters" could have the power to change the fate of a nation.

But for an island that's home to fewer than 16,000 people, the assignment of its domain name has turned out to be a "hidden Caribbean goldmine" – lying dormant for years, before becoming a valuable commodity.

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A 'windfall'

After years of obscurity, Anguilla's domain exploded in popularity. The "continuing boom" in artificial intelligence (AI) following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, led to increasing numbers of companies and entrepreneurs paying the island nation to "register new websites with .ai tag", said the BBC.

With demand high, the financial windfall has been staggering for the Eastern Caribbean nation. In 2023 alone, a "surge" in .ai registrations created EC$87 million (£24 million) in income, said the International Monetary Fund, "just over 20% of the government's total revenue for the year". For a nation that has been "heavily dependent on tourism", the .ai boom is "diversifying the economy" and making it "more resilient".

For Anguillians, this twist of fate feels "lucky", said The New York Times last year. The nation didn't invent artificial intelligence, but its country-code internet suffix is now powering it – to the benefit of its people. The unexpected revenue has been routed towards offering "free healthcare for citizens 70 and older", said last year, with a budget "doubled" for sports activities and events, and funds also going towards improving the island's airport.

"Some people call it a windfall", Anguilla's former premier Ellis Webster, told the newspaper. "We just call it God smiling down on us."

'Cashing in'

The future is bright for Anguilla, as its government expects revenues from its domain name to "increase further" to EC$132 million (£36.4 million) in 2025, and EC$138 million (£38.1 million) next year, said the BBC. But an undisclosed cut will have to go to a US tech firm, Identity Digital, hired by the island to help "manage its burgeoning domain name income".

However, Anguilla isn't the first country "cashing in on demand for websites with distinctive address endings", said The Associated Press. Montenegro's .me domain is popular among those "who want to claim their pronoun for personal branding", while Colombia's .co web address has been claimed more than two million times.

Perhaps the most successful case is the "chain of coral atolls and reef islands" that make up the remote nation of Tuvalu, said The Washington Post in 2019. In 2018 the country profited to the tune of "$19 million (£14 million) in licence fees" from its .tv web domain – otherwise known as "the worldwide metonym for broadcast entertainment". And "thanks to the recent surge in streaming sites", it appears that profits won't be slowing down any time soon.