The AI boom has provided an unusual windfall for a tiny island in the Caribbean.
ChatGPT‘s debut nearly two years ago heralded the dawn of the AI age and accidentally contributed a huge amount to Anguilla’s economy. Big businesses came in and kicked off a digital gold rush as companies scrambled to stake their own claims by acquiring websites that end in .ai.
The British territory with a population of less than 16,000 was allotted control of the .ai internet address in the 1990s. It was one of hundreds of obscure top-level domains assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names. While the domains are supposed to indicate a website has a link to a particular region or language, it’s not always a requirement.
There are now more than 533,000 .ai web domains, an increase of more than 10-fold since 2018.
Google uses google.ai to showcase its artificial intelligence services while Elon Musk uses x.ai as the homepage for his Grok AI chatbot. Startups like AI search engine Perplexity have also snapped up .ai web addresses, redirecting users from the .com version.
Anguilla’s earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled last year to $32 million, fueled by the surging interest in AI. The income now accounts for about 20% of Anguilla’s total government revenue. Before the AI boom, it hovered at around 5%.
Anguilla’s government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee every time a .ai web address is renewed, Identity Digital Chief Strategy Officer Ram Mohan said the fee — $140 for two years — won’t change. The national is also paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have fetched tens of thousands of dollars.
The money directly boosts the economy of Anguilla, which is just 35 square miles (91 square kilometers) and has a population of about 16,000. Blessed with coral reefs, clear waters and palm-fringed white sand beaches, the island is a haven for uber-wealthy tourists. Still, many residents are underprivileged and tourism has been battered by the pandemic and, before that, a powerful hurricane.
Anguilla doesn’t have its own AI…
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