It is easy to think of Nvidia, which is leading the AI semiconductor ecosystem, as a company that is receiving the most attention due to the unprecedented boom in the artificial intelligence industry. When expanding into a country, however, surprisingly, a small island country in the Caribbean Sea is considered. It is a story of British angulas with a population of 16,000 people.
According to a BBC report on the 1st, the government of Anguilla earned about $39 million last year alone as people flocked to buy the country code domain “.ai” domain. This represents 23% of the country’s total revenue. According to a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last year, Anguilla earned $32 million from domain sales in 2023.
It is not recent that Anguilla’s .ai domain has received attention. Interest in the .ai domain has increased since at least 2023. On the same day, the US media Business Insider (BI) explained that with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the number of .ai websites exploded.
As of last month, the number of .ai websites was about 859,000. In 2020, there were less than 50,000. This is a 17-fold increase in five years. Some of the companies that own the .ai website include big tech companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and X.
It is a coincidence that Anguilla was assigned this domain. In the early 1980s, countries were assigned a country domain, also known as the “country top-level domain” (ccTLD). In the process, Korea started to use the same address as .kr” and Japan as .jp, which are familiar to Korea.
Anguilla was assigned the .ai domain at this time. BBC described it as a “jackpot unexpected even by anguilla”.
The cost of purchasing an .ai address is said to range from around $150 to $200. However, the website addresses that are in high demand are traded at much higher prices. Damesh Shah, one of the co-founders of the U.S. software company Hubspot, bought the you.ai address for $700,000.
Last year, the Anguilla government signed a five-year contract with U.S.-based Internet domain business entity ID Digital to entrust the company with domain registration management. It is a structure in which ID Digital is in charge of server and address sales and collects 10% of fees.
However, in an interview with BI, Damesh Shah said, “In the long run, the value of the .ai address will fall,” and predicted, “In the end, the .com domain will maintain more stable values.”
EJ SONG
US ASIA JOURNAL
