Imagine you inherited a piece of land decades ago.
It seemed fine – not spectacular, but fine. Then, one day, someone discovered the land sits directly above one of the most valuable oil fields in the world. You didn’t do anything differently. The world just changed around you.
That’s essentially what happened to Anguilla.
Anguilla is a British overseas territory in the Caribbean. It’s 16 miles long and at its widest point, just 3.5 miles across. About 16,000 people live there. It has gorgeous beaches, luxury resorts, and an economy that has long lived and died by the tourist season.
When hurricanes come – and they do come, Hurricane Irma wiped out roughly 90% of GDP in 2017 – the whole island feels it.
But Anguilla has something else now. Something it’s had since the 1990s, when barely anyone noticed. It owns .ai.
A domain name from another era
In the early days of the internet, every country was assigned a two-letter code for its websites.
The United States got .us. The United Kingdom got .uk. Germany got .de. And Anguilla, almost by bureaucratic accident, got .ai – because that’s what “Anguilla” abbreviates to.
For years, this was a mildly useful thing. Anguillans could make government websites and local businesses could get online. The domain ticked along quietly. In 2018, the total revenue Anguilla earned from .ai domain registrations was just $2.9 million. Decent, but not transformative.
Then ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and the world started paying very close attention to artificial intelligence.
Two letters completely reimagined in a modern world
Suddenly, .ai wasn’t just a Caribbean country code. It was a brand signal.
If you were an AI startup trying to look like you belonged in the AI world, a .ai domain was the fastest way to say so. Before anyone even saw your homepage, the URL told them what you were.
Think about how domains like perplexity.ai, claude.ai, and meta.ai read.
Companies like these deliberately use the .ai extension to emphasise their connection to artificial intelligence. The two letters do branding work that would otherwise cost a marketing team months to achieve.
The rush to register .ai domains that followed was staggering. Registrations surged from 144,000 in 2022 to 354,000 in 2023, and by 2025 the milestone of one million registered .ai domains was passed.
According to an analysis by Identity Digital, 28% of all newly founded tech startups now rely on a .ai domain.
And every single one of those registrations puts money directly into the Anguillian government’s treasury.
The numbers in context
Registrars pay Anguilla US$140 for a two-year .ai registration. About 90% of domains are renewed after those two years – making it a recurring revenue stream, not just a one-time sale.
What that adds up to is almost hard to believe for a territory this small. In 2023, the surge generated approximately US$32 million — just over 20% of the government’s total revenue for the year, compared to around 5% in previous years.
By 2024, that figure had risen to around US$39 million, almost a quarter of total government revenue — an almost incomprehensible shift for a domain that once contributed less than 1%.
For a large tech company, $39 million is a rounding error in a quarterly report. For Anguilla, it’s the difference between a government that struggles and one that can invest in its future.
Turning a windfall into an ongoing opportunity
Anguilla’s leaders seem aware that a boom built on naming trends could cool.
AI enthusiasm is intense right now, but categories can cool. Some companies will eventually prefer something more evergreen than a domain that announces “yes, we are an AI company.”
By most accounts, that’s what Anguilla is trying to use the money to build things that last. The government has committed to a prudent fiscal strategy, paying down debt and prioritising capital expenditure, with investments planned in airport development and renewable energy.
The .ai revenue is also funding road and lighting infrastructure, social relief measures like tax cuts, improved public services, and free healthcare for children.
To manage the technical side of the exploding demand, Anguilla transitioned operational control of its domain registry to Identity Digital in January 2025, one of the largest domain infrastructure providers globally. The government retains ownership and continues to share in the revenue, while Identity Digital handles the technical and commercial infrastructure.
All this represents a permanent and meaningful change to the island’s economic resilience.
Final thoughts
Anguilla’s story is unusual, but it’s not the only one like it. Other small territories have found similar luck with their country codes.
The domain for St. Vincent and the Grenadines (.vc) is widely used by venture capital firms. The domain tag .ag, assigned to Antigua and Barbuda, is popular with agriculture-related businesses.
These haven’t produced the same windfall, but they point to the same dynamic: assets assigned almost randomly, decades ago, that suddenly take on new meaning when the world around them changes.
What Anguilla had wasn’t cleverness — at least not at first. It was a piece of internet infrastructure that sat quietly for years until two letters meant something completely different to millions of people making decisions about how to present themselves online.
The asset didn’t change. The context did. And sometimes, that’s all it takes.
