InterNetX has published an extensive article on Anguilla's ccTLD .AI. This domain zone, little known a few years ago, today has become one of the most popular and attracts registrants from all over the world. Of course, it owes this attention to the popularity of AI which stands for Artificial Intelligence and coincides with the name of the domain. The InterNetX publication tells a lot of interesting things about the domain zone.
Anguilla is an island nation with an area of 91 square kilometers in the Caribbean Sea, which has the status of a self-governing overseas territory of Great Britain. The .AI was delegated in February 1995, and for nearly 15 years it only allowed third-level names off.ai, com.ai, net.ai, and org.ai. But in September 2009, second-level names became available to registrants, which undoubtedly contributed to future popularity.
This popularity began to rise a few years ago, as tech startups developing the possibilities of using artificial intelligence received very significant funding. And since the “world premiere” of the ChatGPT, popularity has skyrocketed. At the moment, the growth rate of .AI is almost 73% compared to the previous year. In June, the registry reported that the number of registrations in the domain had reached 248,609.
This success has had a very positive effect on Anguilla's economy. Thus, last year the country's authorities planned to receive 6.4 million euros from registration operations in the national domain. However, the reality exceeded the wildest expectations: the income amounted to at least 26 million euros. Prices for names in the .AI zone and in the aftermarket are skyrocketing. For example, only on the Sedo site and only in August of this year, several noteworthy transactions were concluded: the NPC.ai domain was sold for $250,000, expert.ai for $107,293, and analytics.ai and samur.ai for $50,000 each. According to the same site Sedo, the median cost of names in the .AI domain today is about $3,000. For comparison, the median cost of names in the most popular .COM domain is estimated at about $300.
Of course, domain investors are in a hurry to register names in such a "hot" domain. However, it is interesting that the majority of names in the domain zone do not appear to be registered for investment purposes: 73.2% of domain names have websites. This is extremely high compared to other gTLDs. If we talk about the hosting of these sites, then the undisputed leader is the United States of America, which accounts for 60.2%. This is followed by India - 13.8% - and the Netherlands - 5.2%.
