Investors from India and US drive surge in .si domain registrations
in plain words
A huge number of people are buying up web addresses that end in .si, which is Slovenia's country code, because it also stands for “super intelligence,” a term President Trump told US agencies to use instead of “AI.” Surprisingly, more buyers came from India than the US. Most people are grabbing short, catchy names to resell later rather than actually using them for anything.
The rush for Slovenia's .si domain extension has continued well past its initial spike. On October 9, 2026, Register.si's live counter showed 19,541 new .si registration Obtaining the right to use a domain name for a set period. Full definition of registration in the prior 24 hours, about five times the roughly 3,700-a-day average seen the week after President Trump's UN speech. The frenzy began on September 22, 2026, when Trump told the UN General Assembly the US government would start using “super intelligence,” or SI, instead of “artificial intelligence.” A week later he signed Executive Order 14434, directing federal agencies to drop the terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” entirely. Because “SI” also happens to be Slovenia's country code, domain speculators seized on .si names, which unlike Anguilla's .ai extension require no residency and can be registered for just one year.
Register.si's own figures show the scale of the shift: 3,515 new .si domains registered in all of August versus 46,066 in September. Daily totals jumped from 4,115 on September 29, the day the order was signed, to 11,331 on September 30 and 12,728 on October 1.
Data shared exclusively with TechRadar Pro by Hostinger, a major retail seller of the extension, shows India led registrations with 3,174 (25.5%), narrowly ahead of the US with 3,135 (25.2%), figures matching what Hostinger separately told TechCrunch. Morocco followed distantly with 678, ahead of the UK, Canada, Germany and the UAE. Pakistan, Egypt and Algeria also ranked in the top 20.
Short, generic names dominated buyer interest: Hostinger could not categorize 57.1% of registrations, but among those it could, short names (1,554) far outnumbered tech-themed (1,040) and explicitly AI-themed names (372), the latter making up just 3% of total registrations.
Research firm Netcraft found that more than half of .si names registered through Dynadot between Trump's initial Truth Social poll and his UN speech were quickly relisted for resale. Netcraft also identified 87 brand-plus-“superintelligence” dot-com names registered hours before the executive order, listed at $20,000 each with no confirmed sales. Of 35 documented .si sales in the first half of 2026, only two buyers were companies intending actual use, including AI startup Recursive, which paid $20,000 for recursive.si. Domain Name Wire estimated the September surge generated roughly €300,000 in extra revenue for the registry The central database and system of a top-level domain, or loosely the organization that runs it. Full definition of registry.