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Where Your .ai Domain Money Actually Goes

To a Caribbean island of 15,000 people that earned $93 million from .ai registrations last year. They are using it to abolish property tax, build a solar plant, and upgrade their hospital. Here is the unusual economics of the AI boom.

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Ash Youssef

4 May 2026 · 7 min read

Where Your .ai Domain Money Actually Goes — Photo Credit: Anguilla Tourist Board

When you register yourbusiness.ai for around £90 per year, billed two years at a time, the money does not go to a tech registrar in Silicon Valley. It goes to the government of Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory in the eastern Caribbean with a population of about 15,000. Anguilla was assigned the .ai country code in 1995, decades before "AI" meant what it means today. Now it is one of the most valuable two-letter accidents in the history of the internet.

The numbers

The growth has been steep. In 2018, .ai registrations brought the Anguillan government around $2.9 million. By 2024 it was $39 million. In 2025 it was $93 million, which is about 47% of the entire national budget. The 2026 forecast is EC$260.5 million, roughly $96 million. As of April 2026 there are about 1.1 million .ai websites in existence, with the registry forecasting 1.7 million by the end of the year.

To put that per resident: Anguilla's population is about 15,000. The 2025 figure works out to roughly $6,200 per person, just from .ai registrations, before any other tax revenue or external income.

The only ccTLDs in a comparable revenue bracket are Tuvalu's .tv (around $10 million a year, roughly 8% of the Tuvaluan government's revenue) and the British Indian Ocean Territory's .io (around $42 million in 2024). But .io is the odd one out, because that money goes to a private registry operator, not to any government. The UK has confirmed it receives nothing from it. That is part of what makes Anguilla's arrangement so unusual: the government itself captures the money. Anguilla's .ai haul is roughly nine times .tv and more than twice .io in a single year. .io is also under a question mark of its own: the UK agreed in 2024 to hand the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius and signed the treaty in 2025, which could eventually see the IO code dropped from the ISO country list and the TLD itself phased out. .ai looks stable by contrast. Anguilla is keeping its TLD, and the Anguillan government is in no danger of being absorbed by anybody.

Every AI company that bought a .ai domain helped fund a government larger than several Pacific nations. OpenAI, Stability, Character, Perplexity, Mistral, x.ai. All of them are technically funding a Caribbean treasury whether they realise it or not.

For most of the run-up, the registry was operated by one person. Vince Cate, an American cryptography developer who moved to Anguilla in 1994, volunteered to manage the country's TLD when nobody else stepped forward and ran it largely on his own through his company Zenaida for nearly three decades. "We're blowing past that," he told Fortune in September 2023 about the year's projected $25 to $30 million in registration revenue. The year ended at $32 million. Cate handed the registry over to Identity Digital in early 2025, by which point the volumes had grown beyond what a one-person operation could comfortably handle.

What they are spending it on

The 2026 budget address listed a set of priorities that would not be out of place in a Scandinavian social-democracy white paper.

Property tax has been abolished entirely. Healthcare is now free for everyone under five and over seventy. A $13 million programme of hospital upgrades was funded for 2026. The completion of a school technical block, an expansion of the school meals programme, and a national rollout of e-learning systems were all funded directly from .ai revenue. So was a 12-megawatt solar plant for energy independence, a water network modernisation programme, and a road rehabilitation programme.

By the end of 2025, public debt had fallen to about 19.9% of GDP. The 2025 budget closed with a surplus of $87.3 million.

What could go wrong

Running half a government's budget off a single revenue stream is fragile by design. Three risks are worth tracking, none of them imminent but all real.

The first is the renewal cliff. .ai domains are sold in two-year blocks, and most of the 2024 and 2025 registrations were new buyers chasing the AI boom. The first wave of those domains comes up for renewal late 2026 and through 2027. If renewal rates underperform, which is common for novelty-driven ccTLD registrations, Anguilla's revenue could plateau or dip even as the total domain count keeps growing.

The second is the pricing ceiling. The registry raised its wholesale fee by $20 in early 2026. There is a point somewhere above which the market resists; passing it suppresses demand. Anguilla has to balance maximising present-year revenue against protecting future renewal rates.

The third is the AI funding cycle. The .ai boom is downstream of broader AI investment patterns. If the funding climate cools sharply in 2027 or 2028, the wave of new AI startups that drove the 2024 and 2025 registration spike thins out, and renewals follow.

The 2026 budget address acknowledges this exposure in passing. Anguilla is not blind to it. But a country running half its budget off a single TLD has more downside concentration than a typical revenue mix, and that should be in the picture alongside the celebratory numbers.

Why this story is interesting

There is a particular kind of AI news that tends to dominate the cycle: another funding round, another model release, another job-displacement warning. The Anguilla story is interesting because it is none of those. It is a quiet, almost accidental example of an AI boom funnelling money into roads, hospitals, schools, and solar panels in a place that had no part in building the technology.

It is also a reminder that owning the right thing at the right time matters more than most strategic positioning does. Anguilla did not invent AI. They were assigned two letters in 1995 that nobody really cared about for thirty years.

Should you register a .ai domain?

If you are a small business considering whether to grab a .ai domain for your AI-flavoured product or service, two things are worth knowing.

First, the price. .ai domains are sold in two-year increments and cost roughly £60 to £150 a year depending on your registrar, well above the £10 to £15 a year for a .com or .co.uk. You are paying for the scarcity premium that comes with owning a two-letter ccTLD that everyone in the AI industry wants.

Second, the considerations. The .ai TLD is run by the government of Anguilla via Identity Digital. That means it is a country-code domain, not a generic one. ICANN does not control its policy; Anguilla does. In practice this has been entirely uneventful for registrants and there are no political or regulatory issues to speak of. But for risk-averse buyers it is worth knowing that a .ai is a slightly different beast from a .com.

Good for: any business that genuinely positions itself in the AI space and wants the immediate-recognition benefit of the TLD.

The catch: if your business is not actually AI-related, a .ai domain reads as marketing-driven and is mildly misleading. Visitors pick up on it, and so do search engines. A .com or .co.uk is still the right default for most small businesses.

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How AI with Ash can support you

At AI with Ash, we work with SMEs, vibe coders and fresh developers on the broader question of how AI fits into a real business. If you are weighing up whether a .ai domain is right for your specific situation, or thinking about the broader AI strategy of a business you are building, book a call with Ash and we will talk it through.