AI Is Now 'SI': The .si Domain Rush Explained — And Who Actually Loses Money
What actually happened
On 22 September 2026, speaking to the UN General Assembly, Donald Trump said the United States would stop calling it artificial intelligence and start calling it "super intelligence". He then signed an executive order requiring US federal agencies to use the term.
Two letters. SI. And Slovenia happens to own them.
.si has been Slovenia's country domain since 1992, quietly registering a few
hundred thousand names over three decades. For most of the past year, the
registry recorded roughly a thousand new registrations a month. In the two
days after the speech it took more than six thousand. On 30 September alone
it took about eleven thousand.
Netcraft measured something sharper: .si registrations overtook .ai
within 25 hours of the speech. For a 34-year-old national domain most people
outside Slovenia had never typed, that is a strange week.
If this feels familiar, it is. The same thing happened to .ai — Anguilla's
country domain — when the last AI boom started, and it earned the island
territory tens of millions of dollars.
(Figures above from TechCrunch and Netcraft, read 4 October 2026.)
The sales people keep quoting
There have been real sales, and they are the reason your feed is full of this:
| Domain | Price | Note |
|---|---|---|
ai.si | $34,000 | the obvious one |
recursive.si | $20,000 | bought by Recursive, an AI lab that left stealth in May 2026 at a $4.65B valuation |
otherwise.si | $18,888 | private buyer, 24 September 2026 |
build.si | $17,435 | |
acquire.si | $14,888 | |
self.si | $12,500 |
A .si registration costs around $11–12 a year. Against a $34,000 sale,
that looks like the best risk-reward in technology.
It is not, and the reason is in the next section.
The part the screenshots leave out
Three facts change the picture completely.
First: more than half the rush was speculation, immediately. Netcraft
tracked .si domains registered through one large registrar between Trump's
social post on 19 September and the UN speech on 22 September. By 23 September,
about 52% of them were already listed for sale on the aftermarket. Not
developed. Not parked for a project. Flipped, within days.
Second: the buyers are mostly each other. Domain Name Wire's analysis of who
is actually buying .si found that domain investors are behind nearly every
transaction. That is the signal that matters. A market where speculators sell to
speculators has no floor under it — it needs end users, businesses that will
build something on the name, and right now there are very few.
Third: the overlap is enormous. Netcraft found more than 44,000 cases
where the same second-level name exists on both .si and .ai — roughly 22% of
all registered .si domains. Many were registered specifically because someone
already owns the .ai. That is a lot of people betting on the same small number
of buyers.
So: tens of thousands of new names, over half for sale on arrival, and a buyer
pool made largely of other sellers. The handful of five-figure sales are real.
They are also survivorship bias. For every otherwise.si, there are thousands
of names that will quietly expire in twelve months.
Register.si itself has been notably unexcited. It charges registrars about €10 per domain and has publicly called the "millions for Slovenia" headlines baseless.
Three risks nobody mentions in the hype threads
It is a country domain, and search engines know that
.si is tied to Slovenia. If your customers are not Slovenian, a country-code
domain is a real consideration for search visibility — the association is a
signal, and it is not one you can simply opt out of.
This is the single most common mistake we expect to see: someone moves their
actual business onto a .si because it reads well, and quietly damages search
performance that took years to build. If you want the name, redirect it to
your real domain. Do not move your site onto it.
The legal exposure is genuine
Slovenia runs a dispute process (ARDS), and .si is also subject to the global
UDRP rules. Both let trademark and company-name holders take a domain off you.
Registering boeing.si or openai.si because it is "just two letters" is not a
clever arbitrage; it is the textbook bad-faith registration those processes were
built to reverse. Registrars close accounts over it.
Generic dictionary words are fine. Someone else's brand is not. The line is not blurry.
The term might not stick
The whole premise rests on "SI" entering general use. Today it is a US government mandate, not a shift in how engineers, researchers or the rest of the world talk. If "AI" remains the word everyone actually uses — and it is a very entrenched word — the demand under these names goes away and the renewal invoice still arrives.
So should you buy one?
An honest framework, in the order we would actually apply it.
If you want to protect your brand: yes, and this is the clearest case in the
whole trend. Registering yourbrand.si and pointing it at your real site costs
about the price of a coffee per year and stops someone else holding your name.
Treat it as insurance, not an investment.
If you have a product whose name genuinely completes with "si": yes.
synthe.si, analy.si, diagno.si, hypothe.si — a name that reads as a real
word is worth more than one that reads as a gimmick, in any domain extension and
in any decade.
If you want to flip names for profit: understand what you are entering. Buying five names is a ~$60 lottery ticket, and treating it as anything more is how people end up renewing worthless domains for three years. Set a decision date before you buy — if a name draws no serious interest by month ten, let it expire. The sunk-cost renewal is where this trade actually loses money.
If you are moving your main website to it: no. See the ccTLD point above.
If you are buying it because a thread told you it is free money: no. Over half of these were for sale within three days of registration. You would be joining the supply side of a market that already has too much supply.
If you already own one, it is currently worth nothing
This is the part we care about, so we will be upfront that we have an interest in it.
Tens of thousands of .si domains were registered in the last two weeks. The
overwhelming majority resolve to a parking page or to nothing at all. A domain
with no page on it cannot be found, cannot be valued by a buyer, and cannot do
anything for a business.
If you are holding to sell, a real for-sale page — stating the name, what word it completes, an asking price and an escrow-backed way to make an offer — is the difference between a buyer contacting you and a buyer assuming the name is abandoned. If you are holding to build, then the name is the easy part and the site is the work.
We build both: launch pages, brand kits and launch videos, in 72 hours. That is on our .si launch services page, with prices listed rather than "contact for quote".
And if the honest answer for your particular name is that it is not worth spending money on, we will tell you that instead. Most of these names are not.
The short version
A real surge, driven by a real policy change, producing a handful of real five-figure sales — sitting on top of a market where most participants are selling to each other and more than half the inventory went up for sale within three days.
Spend small. Never register someone else's brand. Redirect, do not migrate. Set your walk-away date before you buy, not when the renewal notice arrives.
Sources: TechCrunch (2 October 2026), Netcraft (24 September and 1 October 2026), Domain Name Wire, Foreign Policy (28 September 2026), Register.si. All figures read 4 October 2026. Domain prices move; verify before acting on any number here.
Not legal, tax or investment advice. Domain-sale profits are taxable in India — talk to your CA.