Trump’s ‘Super Intelligence’ Sparks a Rush on .si Domains

One Trump remark, and Slovenia briefly became domain-market catnip. After the U.S. president started pushing “Super Intelligence” as the new label for artificial intelligence, registrants piled into .si, the country code for Slovenia and, by coincidence, the homeland of Melania Trump.

The spike has been sharp. Domaintechnik, the Austrian hosting provider, says that since Trump’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly just over a week ago, more .si than .ai domains have been registered each day, based on data from domainnamestat.com. On the day after the speech, 3,234 new .si domains were added. A normal September day used to bring about 100.

The trend did not come out of nowhere. Trump first floated the rename on Truth Social, arguing that “artificial” made the technology sound wrong. He then repeated the idea at the U.N., where he said the U.S. government would use “Super Intelligence,” or SI, and later signed an executive order telling federal agencies to adopt the new terms. The phrase has even shown up in talks with China.

In the week after the speech, 17,621 new .si domains were registered, compared with 7,209 new .ai domains. The total number of .si domains climbed from 241,846 to 262,319 in eleven days, an 8.5 percent jump. There was already some heat in May, when registrations ran at roughly three times a normal month as investors bet that “SI” might become shorthand for superintelligence.

But this is mostly a trade in speculation, not usage. Netcraft says about 52 percent of .si domains registered through Dynadot were quickly listed for sale, including donaldjtrump.si. The asking prices can be absurdly high: build.si is listed at $10 million, seed.si at $8 million. Of 35 publicly documented .si sales in the first half of the year, only two went to buyers actually using the domain for their own businesses.

There’s a catch, too. Because the “s” sits right next to the “a” on a keyboard, a .si address is one typo away from a .ai address. Netcraft says more than 44,000 .si domains share a name with an existing .ai domain, which makes them useful for phishing as well as branding.

Slovenia is not about to become the next Anguilla. Register.si says demand is up strongly but steadily, and that revenue per domain is small. Domain Name Wire estimates the extra September revenue at about 300,000 euros. The registry is still telling brands to grab their .si names quickly, which sounds less like a windfall and more like a warning.