Slovenia Just Banked €440,000 on Trump's 'SI' Slip

Update, Oct. 2

The rush is still accelerating. Computerworld reports 9,780 new .si registrations in the 24 hours after Trump's executive order — nearly triple all of August (3,515). Registrations were running at about 2,726 a month a year ago, and .ai names currently fetch $90 against roughly $10 for .si.

By Daniel Rao

Photo: Lake Bled, Slovenia — the Alpine nation whose .si domain suffix just became the most fashionable two letters on the internet. (Ajznponar / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Nobody in Ljubljana asked for this. Slovenia — 2.1 million people, one famous First Lady, and, until last month, a perfectly sleepy little internet registry — has just collected roughly €440,000 in a single month because the President of the United States decided the word "artificial" sounds fake. The money was not a grant, a trade deal, or a tariff concession. It was domain names. Forty-four thousand of them.

Trump wants artificial intelligence renamed "super intelligence", abbreviated SI. Those also happen to be the initials of Slovenia's country-code domain, .si. So when Washington started talking about SI, the internet's speculators did what speculators do: they bought Slovenia. All of it, or at least the parts you can type into a browser bar.

And here is the twist that should embarrass everyone involved: 53% of Americans would rather keep calling it "artificial intelligence" anyway. Only 9% want "super intelligence". Slovenia got rich off a rebrand its own intended audience has already rejected.

The numbers are absurd

Start with the official count, because it comes from the people cashing the cheques. Klara Herman, spokeswoman for Register.si — the agency that manages Slovenia's domain names — told the BBC that 44,000 web addresses with the .si suffix were registered in September, compared with fewer than 2,000 in August. That is an increase of more than 2,100%.

She said the scale of activity in late September was "unprecedented" compared with the previous 12 months, and that September's registrations stood out "very clearly" against every other month of the year — although she was "cautious" about attributing the entire increase to only President Trump's comments. On 30 September alone, she said, 11,000 new registrations were recorded.

Now do the part nobody at Register.si is complaining about. The registry charges registrars €10 wholesale for every .si domain sold, per Domain Name Wire's reporting. We re-ran the maths ourselves: at €10 a domain, the BBC's 44,000 figure works out at €440,000 in registry revenue for one month — against a normal month worth less than €20,000. Domain Name Wire, reading the same registry data, counted 46,066 September registrations, which would push the real figure past €460,000.

Photo: Ljubljana Castle above Slovenia's capital. The country's registry, register.si, charges registrars €10 for every .si domain sold — and September sold 44,000 of them. (Tournasol7 / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The pace is the telling part. Euronews, citing Herman, reported on 29 September that the registry had been averaging 3,700 new domains a day since Trump's speech — against about 3,500 for the whole of August — and that the total number of registered .si domains had passed 220,000. Domain Name Wire's Andrew Allemann logged 219,000 total registrations as of 10:30am Pacific on 28 September, up from 190,000 in a 4 September archive of the registry's figures: more than 15% growth in under a month. In all of August there were 3,515 .si registrations; after the speech, most single days beat that.

Register.si has noticed what is happening to its own product. It issued an advisory that, per Euronews, "strongly recommends to holders of trademarks, slogans, company names and others who do not yet own a .si domain that they register one as soon as possible." Translation: the vultures are circling, and the registry would very much like your money too.

How two letters became a lottery ticket

Forget the romance of slow, organic demand — the dates tell a different story. This thing detonated.

The starting gun fired on 19 September, when Trump asked his Truth Social followers whether AI should be renamed — offering "super intelligence" as one of the choices. On 22 September, he stood before the UN General Assembly in New York and made it policy-adjacent theatre: "The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake," he told the Assembly. "It's not fake, it's actually amazing. But we have to be careful… welcome to the new world of super intelligence." He said America would begin using what he called "the much more accurate term 'super intelligence, SI'" in official documents.

A week later came the executive order that made "SI" official US government language, directing departments and agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" across correspondence, websites and reports. Days later, Trump sat down with tech bosses for a meeting he called "an extraordinary gathering" of the people "building America's Golden Age", as the BBC put it.

But here is the detail that should make everyone slightly uncomfortable: the buying started before the speech. Netcraft, the internet security firm, found that registrations began accelerating roughly three days before Trump's UN address — lining up almost exactly with that 19 September Truth Social poll. Netcraft says it cannot determine whether registrants were acting on anticipation of the announcement or on unrelated factors. It is careful. You do not have to be: somebody saw this coming.

The flippers got there first

This is the part where any romance about Slovenian digital entrepreneurship dies. The buyers were not Slovenian bakeries finally getting online. They were domain investors, and they were ruthlessly early.

Andrew Allemann, who has published Domain Name Wire since 2005 and been quoted on domains by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, wrote this month: "While Trump added fuel to the fire, domain investors were already ahead of this trend." His kicker: "Super intelligence was already a term, and domain investors have been piling in for months."

Netcraft's data backs him up. In the 25 hours after the UN speech, new .si registrations actually overtook .ai — Anguilla's famous AI suffix — and more than half of the .si domains Netcraft detected being registered through Dynadot between the 19 September poll and the speech were already listed for resale on Dynadot's aftermarket by 23 September. Fifty-two percent. Bought and flipped within days, most of them never intended to host a single webpage.

The shopping list reads like a fever dream. Netcraft spotted donaldjtrump.si, superintell.si, boeing.si, puffin.si, vaccination.si and unitedstate.si among the pre-speech purchases now sitting on the aftermarket. One hopeful seller, flagged in reporting on the frenzy, is asking more than $14 million for build.si — a domain that cost perhaps twelve dollars to register.

The professionals left fingerprints everywhere. An independent check of the registry's records found domain hacks like analy.si, synthe.si, hypothe.si and diagno.si were scooped up between April and June 2026 through the same US registrar — months before Trump said a word at the UN. Names registered in the days after the speech, like seoagency.si, already resolve to parked for-sale pages. Registrars moved fast too: Hostinger is advertising .si at $11.99 for the first year with ad copy that reads, in effect, "AI is now called superintelligence, register your .si", while Gandi lists the same extension at $126 a year.

And the end users? Missing. Leanne Mac, who tracks the domains used by ProductHunt launches, found no startups launching with .si in the past 30 days. Fifty of the day's launches used .ai. None chose .si. As Allemann wrote in his headline: "Domain investors are betting on .si. Will businesses, too?" So far, the answer is no.

Anguilla already wrote this playbook

Slovenia is not the first tiny territory to win the country-code lottery. It is just the latest, and the template was set by Anguilla.

Anguilla's suffix exists thanks to a gloriously boring bureaucratic accident: back in the mid-1990s, ICANN handed the island .ai simply because AI is its ISO country code. Then ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, and overnight every startup on the planet decided it needed those two letters. The registration curve went vertical — 144,000 in 2022, 354,000 in 2023 (a 230% leap), roughly 880,000 in 2024, and past the one-million mark in the first week of January 2026, according to Domain Name Stat.

Forget romance; follow the money. IMF figures put Anguilla's 2023 .ai takings at about $32 million — 22% of the entire government's revenue. Sherwood News estimates the territory is now pulling in roughly $70 million a year from the suffix. Cora Richardson Hodge, Anguilla's premier, said in her 2026 budget address: "Revenue from domain name registration continues to exceed expectations." The budget projects domain income hitting EC$260.5 million — nearly $96.4 million — for the latest year. That is a Caribbean island of about 15,000 people funding its government off two letters.

Montenegro ran a smaller version of the same trick years ago, when its .me suffix became the internet's favourite personal-domain and call-to-action ending. The pattern is always identical: a boring administrative decision from the 1990s collides with a 2020s mania, and a small country wakes up rich.

The men.com precedent — and the BBC's correction

There is a respectable name for what the .si buyers are doing, and the BBC learned it the hard way this week. Its original Slovenia article described the speculation as "cyber-squatting" and cited Rick Schwartz — "The Domain King" — as the example: in 1997, Schwartz bought men.com for $15,000 and sold it seven years later for $1.32 million.

Schwartz objected, loudly. On 1 October the BBC amended the piece, deleting the cybersquatting reference and stating plainly that simply registering domain names as an investment, in the hope they rise in value — as happened with men.com — "is a legitimate business activity." Domain-industry press is now demanding an apology.

The correction is worth dwelling on, because it captures the whole grubby morality of the .si rush. Nobody broke a law. Registering donaldjtrump.si and hoping the Trump organisation eventually wants it is not theft; it is, legally, just commerce. But there is a difference between commerce and dignity, and a registry quietly banking €440,000 while flippers auction boeing.si to the highest bidder sits firmly on the commerce side of that line.

The insider-trading question

Now the uncomfortable part. If the buying started before the speech — and Netcraft's data says it did, by about three days — who knew what, and when?

Adam Cochran, the crypto venture capitalist and professional social-media gadfly, did not mince words. "I believe Trump's 'SI' Executive Order was ANOTHER criminal plot to enrich the Trump family," he wrote on X this week. "Insiders seem to have profited MILLIONS off of .si domain names before his Truth Social posts."

Cochran's numbers are striking even if you discount the accusation: he counts only dozens of .si registrations a day from 2023 to 2025, then hundreds a day in June 2026, accelerating to thousands in July — two full months before the UN speech. Separate reporting credits him with identifying more than 12,000 .si domains registered before the 19 September poll, some later relisted for millions.

To be fair — and fairness matters here — early buying proves foresight, not insider knowledge. "Super intelligence" was already an industry term; Allemann says investors had been piling in for months on the general trend. And Herman herself was "cautious" about attributing the entire September increase to Trump's comments. Coincidence, trend-riding and genuine leaks all fit the same chart.

But step back and look at the shape of it: a president floats a rebrand in a poll, the people closest to the signal start buying three days before the speech, and a country of 2.1 million — the birthplace of the First Lady, no less — banks nearly half a million euros in a month. If that pattern appeared in a stock chart instead of a domain registry, the SEC would at least be asking questions.

Our verdict: a colossal, shoddy little gold rush

Let us say the quiet part out loud. This entire episode is a colossal piece of theatre, and almost everyone in it comes out looking faintly ridiculous — except, arguably, Slovenia.

A president decided, on vibes, that a two-letter abbreviation used by the entire global technology industry for seventy years sounds "fake". He replaced it with a phrase from science fiction. The markets responded not by adopting the phrase — he floated the idea of the US taking stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic the same week to even less enthusiasm — but by strip-mining a small European country's namespace for flip value. The registry's cut: €10 a head, 44,000 heads, no effort expended whatsoever. It is the easiest money in the history of European public finance.

The shoddy part is what it reveals about the machinery underneath. More than half the early buyers never intended to build anything; they listed on the aftermarket within days. No startups are launching on .si. The trademark advisory Register.si had to issue is an admission that the gold rush's main victims will be ordinary businesses forced to pay ransom prices for their own names. And the pre-speech buying spike — three days early, to the hour of a Truth Social poll — stinks just enough that "cautious" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Herman's statement.

Slovenia, to its credit, did nothing wrong. It owned two letters, the world went mad, and it collected the toll. If there is a lesson here, it is the Anguilla lesson: in the internet economy, the luckiest asset a small country can hold is a meaningless two-letter code and the patience to wait for someone powerful to make it meaningful. Trump made .si meaningful. Slovenia sent the invoice. Everybody else just watched the money move.

And while registries cash in on the frenzy, the platforms are walling off their data: Reddit just killed its RSS feeds to fight AI scrapers.

The Slovenia .si domain rush: your questions answered

How big was the surge? Register.si data, reported by the BBC: 44,000 .si domains were registered in September versus fewer than 2,000 in August — a 2,100% jump, with 11,000 landing on Sept. 30 alone.

How much did Slovenia's registry make? At roughly €10 per registration, that's about €440,000 in registry revenue; Domain Name Wire counted 46,066 registrations, which puts the figure closer to €460,660.

Who flipped the fastest? Netcraft found buying began about three days before the executive order, and 52% of the .si domains registered through Dynadot had already been flipped by Sept. 23. One standout: build.si is asking more than $14M.

Has this happened before? Yes — Anguilla wrote the playbook. Its .ai domain brought in $32M in 2023, about 22% of government revenue, and runs around $70M a year now.

Sources

BBC News (Laura Cress, technology reporter) — "Trump's AI rebrand causes 'unprecedented' demand for Slovenian website names", 1 Oct 2026, via register.si spokeswoman Klara Herman; Domain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann) — "46k .si domains registered in September" (1 Oct 2026) and "Slovenia's .si domain grows more than 15% in wake of Trump's UN speech" (28 Sept 2026); Netcraft — "Slovenian .SI Domain Registrations Outpace .AI" (23 Sept 2026); Euronews, 29 Sept 2026, via Herman; Gizmodo on the Adam Cochran allegations; Sherwood News and newsbytesapp on Anguilla's .ai revenue; Domain Name Wire's Allemann biography (quoted by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and NPR); DomainGang on the BBC's 1 Oct correction; The News (Pakistan) and Free Press Journal on the UNGA speech and registry figures; witscode on .si aftermarket and registrar pricing; bitnewsbot on pre-announcement registrations.

Daniel Rao covers AI policy, frontier labs and the business of the internet for TechPulse USA. He writes about the people and institutions deciding what artificial intelligence is allowed to do — and who gets paid when they decide.