Trump’s ‘Super intelligence’ term triggers rush for Slovenia’s .si domains

Registrations for Slovenia's national internet domain, .si, have surged after US President Donald Trump announced that his administration would replace the term artificial intelligence (AI) with super intelligence (SI).

The new abbreviation happens to match Slovenia's internet country code, prompting tech companies, investors and domain speculators to rush to secure .si web addresses, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.

The frenzy echoes the boom in demand for the .ai domain of the island of Anguilla, which followed the rapid rise of artificial intelligence as a global technology sector.

Following Trump's speech at the UN General Assembly last week, 3,930 new .si domains were registered in just 24 hours, surpassing the 3,515 domains registered during the entire previous month. According to Register.si, Slovenia's national domain registry, there are now more than 217,000 active .si domains.

Prominent international technology companies have already begun securing .si addresses. AI research firm Recursive, for example, recently registered recursive.si, which currently redirects visitors to the company's global .com website.

Despite the sudden spike in global interest, Register.si says its systems are operating normally.

Speculation about massive windfall debunked

The surge has prompted speculation in Slovenian media that the country could reap a major financial windfall, with comparisons drawn to places such as Anguilla and Tuvalu, whose country-code domains - .ai and .tv, respectively - have become valuable commercial assets.

However, Register.si has pushed back against those expectations.

The national registry charges its network of authorised registrars a flat administrative fee of €10 per domain and does not receive the retail markup charged by registrars to customers.

"Speculation in the media about millions in earnings for Slovenia due to the increased interest in .si have no basis in reality," the registry said, though it did advise brand owners to secure their domains promptly.

Origin of Slovenia's country code

Slovenia's ownership of the SI abbreviation is largely the result of historical circumstance.

After declaring independence in the early 1990s, Slovenia initially sought the country code SL from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). But SL had already been assigned to Sierra Leone, so the ISO allocated SI to Slovenia instead.

Incidentally, the abbreviation has an additional linguistic connection to the country: "si" means "you are" in Slovenian.

The .si domain was added to the global root server in April 1992. Slovenia's first web page was hosted the following year on a supercomputer at the Jožef Stefan Institute.

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