🌴 AI Is Turning This Tiny Island into a Paradise

Anguilla, a small country in the Caribbean to the east of Puerto Rico, is experiencing an unprecedented economic boom — thanks to AI!

The Anguilla’s government website is www.gov.ai. This country, with a population of only 16,000, was assigned the .ai domain name back in the 1990s, in the Internet’s early days. Hardly anyone knew about it, nor about this small island itself, until the artificial intelligence boom had kicked off, and multiple startups wanted that very same domain name: Perplexity.ai, Stability.ai, Character.ai, X.ai, and so on.

Many Big Tech leaders have also acquired web pages with addresses ending in .ai: Facebook.ai, Google.ai, and Microsoft.ai.

💰 Until recently, tourism has been Anguilla’s main source of revenue. AI has become an unexpected "golden mine." The island’s government collects a $140 fee from every registration for internet addresses that end .ai. At auctions selling website names the amounts can be much higher.

After the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, millions of dollars flowed into the country. Last year, the number of domains ending in .ai almost doubled, reaching 300,000. In 2023, Anguilla’s government made nearly $32 million from the domain registration fees, which make 10% of its GDP 📊

The income from selling one of the world's most sought-after domain names helped the island recover from the recent heavy hits: the pandemic’s restrictions on travel and a devastating hurricane in 2017.

As Anguilla's prime minister told The New York Times, the government used the money to provide free healthcare to citizens 70 and older, to build a school and a vocational training center, improve the airport, and upgrade sports and events infrastructure.

"Some people call it a windfall. We just call it God smiling down on us" — Ellis Webster, Prime Minister of Anguilla

🚀 As the AI boom continues, the island’s officials hope that in 2024, they receive similar income as last year from domain names.

#news @hiaimediaen