Fun fact! Every 43 seconds, there's a new .ai domain name on Earth.

Where does the money end up? You probably can't guess. On a small island in the Caribbean, Anguilla, with a total population of 15,000—fewer people than many towns on the mainland.

In 1995, when the internet was just starting, countries were assigned two-letter suffixes. China got .cn, the UK got .uk. Anguilla, being Anguilla in English, was assigned .ai. Back then, those two letters were basically worthless paper—nobody imagined that three decades later, they'd become the most valuable two letters on the planet.

In 2021, the island earned just over $70,000 from .ai domain registrations—less than a Silicon Valley engineer's two-month salary.

Then ChatGPT arrived. The first thing new startups did was grab a .ai domain to look AI-related. AI companies around the world started sending money to this small island. Every registration made the treasury ring. In 2023, that revenue soared to over 80 million East Caribbean dollars—more than 200 million RMB. By 2025, domain registrations accounted for nearly 40% of the government's recurrent revenue. For every ten dollars the government took in, four came from those two letters.

What's more, .ai domains require ongoing renewals. The fees for registration, renewal, and transfer flow endlessly into Anguilla's treasury.

Many people think wealth comes from hard work, but sometimes it just drops from the sky. Anguilla's case is classic winning-the-lottery-by-ancestral-fortune lying flat. 😂