Foto Artificial intelligence has gold-plated a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea
We are talking about Anguilla, a British overseas territory with a population of about 18,000 people, meduza writes. Over the past few years, the island’s revenues have grown dramatically not because of the launch of AI companies or technology hubs, but thanks to the sale of Internet domains in the .ai zone.
The .ai domain was originally assigned to Anguilla as the territory’s national internet code (from Anguilla). However, with the growing popularity of artificial intelligence, the acronym AI has become one of the most sought-after technologies in the world. As a result, thousands of companies working in the field of artificial intelligence began to register websites in the Anguilla domain zone en masse.
If at the end of 2022, there were just over 100 thousand domains in the .ai zone, then by the middle of 2023 their number exceeded 350 thousand. By the middle of 2025, the figure rose to 850 thousand, and now the number of registrations exceeded 1.2 million. Thousands more new addresses appear every day.
Against this background, the island’s revenues have soared to record levels. In 2025, Anguilla earned on the sale of domains more than 85 million dollars. For comparison: in 2024 the amount was about 39 million dollars, and before the AI boom – in 2022 – only 7.7 million.
The cost of registering an address in the .ai zone usually starts at $150-200 dollars per year. However, short and attractive names like you.ai or cloud.ai can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auctions.
Today, domains bring almost as much money to Anguilla’s budget as tourism, the traditional mainstay of the island’s economy. Previously, the tourism industry provided up to 37% of the territory’s GDP. As demand for .ai has grown, Anguilla’s total GDP has increased from about $300 million in 2022 to $456 million in 2024.
To cope with the influx of registrations, Anguilla authorities have entered into a five-year contract with Identity Digital, which manages domain sales and registry maintenance. According to media reports, the company receives about 10% of revenue in the form of commission, while the rest goes directly to the island’s budget.
This approach should help Anguilla avoid the mistakes of Tuvalu, another small island nation that got rich on a successful domain. In the late 1990s, Tuvalu transferred the rights to manage the .tv zone to VeriSign for a fixed annual payment. The country’s authorities later admitted that they had cheaped out: with the development of video services and streaming platforms, .tv became much more valuable than originally thought.
