Anguilla’s AI domain registration earns US$80m year-to-date, more than all taxes from productive sector

Registration fees for Anguilla’s .ai Internet domain brought in EC$217 million (US$80 million) in the first seven months of 2026 for the nation of under 14,400 residents.

The .ai suffix, which marks Anguilla’s country code, passed one million registrations worldwide in January and has become popular with artificial intelligence (AI) companies.

“After only seven months, government has already collected 76 per cent of the entire year’s budgetary revenue. Domain name registration has generated EC$217 million between January and July, or 47.5 per cent of all government revenue to date,” stated Premier Cora Richardson Hodge in a recent address posted on the country’s Instagram page on 23 September.

That is more than the EC$203 million in tax revenue generated by the territory’s entire productive sector over the same period, Richardson Hodge said.

Richardson Hodge added that taxes and domain registrations resulted in the government of Anguilla collecting three-quarters of the country’s annual budget, EC$595, million in seven months.

For the full year, the government expects to collect EC$253 million from domain fees.

The pace is striking even by recent standards. US firm Identity Digital manages sales under a five-year agreement signed in October 2024.

Anguilla ended up with the .ai domain by coincidence rather than design. In the mid-1980s, the then Internet Assigned Numbers Authority decided that country-code domains would follow the two-letter codes in the ISO 3166-1 standard, which covers dependent territories as well as sovereign states. Anguilla, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean, was assigned the code ‘AI’. For years, the domain attracted little interest, but the rise of artificial intelligence turned the obscure suffix into valuable online real estate, and registration fees have since become a significant source of government revenue. Anguilla is not alone in benefiting from abbreviations: Tuvalu (.tv), Montenegro (.me), Colombia (.co) and Micronesia (.fm) have also reportedly profited from their domains’ popularity.

Anguilla spans 90 square kilometres, with a population less than some universities. Its nominal gross domestic product reached US$416 million in 2023, the latest year in United Nations data, up from US$261 million in 2020, a gain of about 59 per cent. The 2020 base reflects a pandemic-era slump but also a period prior to the rise of AI popularity. The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank has put growth at 3.2 per cent in 2025.

The government says it wants to turn the windfall into lasting assets. Revenue has helped fund airport and road projects. A sovereign wealth fund, designed with IMF help, has entered the legislative drafting phase.

Officials and the IMF have cautioned that the surge may not last. The IMF said the government expects domain revenue to stabilise at a lower share of total revenue as the initial rush of registrations slows.

business@gleanerjm.com