Anguilla has turned the AI boom into a digital gold mine
The artificial intelligence boom has benefitted 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 US$32 million, fuelled 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 around 5%.
Anguilla’s government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee every time an .ai web address is renewed. The territory signed a deal Tuesday with a US company to manage the domains amid explosive demand but the fees aren’t expected to change. It also gets paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have fetched tens of thousands of dollars.
Lucky name
The money directly boosts the economy of Anguilla, which is just 91 square kilometres 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 a 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.
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 programmes 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’s signing a deal with a US-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.
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 US$32 million, fuelled 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 around 5%.
Anguilla’s government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee every time an .ai web address is renewed. The territory signed a deal Tuesday with a US company to manage the domains amid explosive demand but the fees aren’t expected to change. It also gets paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have fetched tens of thousands of dollars.
Lucky name
The money directly boosts the economy of Anguilla, which is just 91 square kilometres 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 a 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.
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 programmes 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’s signing a deal with a US-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.
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