When people see the top domain .ai these days, they of course think of it as a web address related to artificial intelligence. But .ai is a country domain just like .se, .de, .fr and so on. In this case it’s the Caribbean island of Anguilla that hit the jackpot.
With a population of around 16,000 and domain names being bought for $1.2 million (bot dot ai, for example), the AI ”boom” is hugely lucrative for the small territory. I think about it every time I see a .ai domain name.
Their capital, poetically, is ”The Valley”. The island is just 26 kilometers long and 6 kilometres across, and its shape is what is said to have given the island its name, Anguilla meaning eel in Italian. Before colonisation, though, the Indigenous Arawakan name for the island was Malliouhana, meaning arrow-headed sea serpent.
