Leave it to Donald Trump to accidentally engineer a multinational tech bonanza while signing an executive order. According to TechCrunch, Slovenia's .si domain is experiencing a 2,199% spike in registrations after the President mandated U.S. government agencies rebrand "AI" and "artificial intelligence" as "SI" and "super intelligence." The order is creating a windfall for the country where First Lady Melania Trump was born.
Registry SI, Slovenia's official domain manager, confirmed to the BBC that September alone saw 11,000 new .si addresses registered on the day after Trump signed the order, with nearly 13,000 more in the next 24 hours.
This mirrors what happened when the AI boom accelerated years ago. Demand for the .ai domain, owned by the Caribbean island of Anguilla, brought millions into their coffers. Slovenia is now experiencing the same phenomenon.
Most of these registrations aren't actually AI-related. Hostinger reports that only around 3% of the new .si domains are explicitly labeled as AI-focused, the rest are "unclassified." Speculators are buying them en masse to resell later. One CEO told sources that .si domains are reselling for over a million dollars.
American and Indian buyers account for more than half the registrations on Hostinger. Hostinger now ranks .si as its second-most-popular domain extension, right behind .com. That's extraordinary for a country-code domain that most of the world didn't know existed two months ago.
Melania Trump's Slovenian heritage has shifted from biographical detail to geopolitical asset. This rebrand is funneling global interest and currency back to her native country's digital infrastructure. Slovenia is gaining startup credibility, all because Washington renamed artificial intelligence.
Wix reported minimal uptick. GoDaddy doesn't host .si domains yet. The gold rush is real, and speculators are betting that .si becomes the next .io or .co, except with inadvertent White House endorsement.
