Trump Renamed AI 'Super Intelligence.' Slovenia's .si Domain Suddenly Became the Hottest Piece of Internet Real Estate

When President Trump signed Executive Order 14434 on September 29, the document's most consequential line was, on its face, a matter of vocabulary. It directs every executive department and agency, "to the maximum extent permitted by law," to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory documents — and to "not acknowledge the usage" of the old terms. The order, which Trump had previewed in a September address to the UN General Assembly ("The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake"), also instructs the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to deliver, within 60 days, proposed legislative language establishing a federal statutory definition of "Super Intelligence." Previously issued regulations, contracts and historical documents are untouched.

The ripple effect landed 7,000 kilometers east, on a two-letter country code. The .si domain has been Slovenia's slice of the internet since 1992, run by Register.si, the registry operated by the country's academic and research network ARNES. In August it recorded 3,515 new registrations — a quiet month for a national registry of roughly 190,000 names. In September, according to figures cited by Domain Name Wire, it recorded 46,066. That is roughly a thirteenfold jump; registry spokeswoman Klara Herman, citing the registry's own cut of the data, told the BBC the increase exceeded 2,100 percent and described the scale of activity in late September as "unprecedented," while cautioning against attributing all of it to Trump's campaign. The single busiest day was September 30, the day after the order: 11,000 new .si addresses in twenty-four hours.

The counter kept spinning into October. By October 1 the registry reported 13,603 registrations in the preceding 24 hours and 241,459 domains in total; by October 3 its public counter showed 261,670, with 12,399 added in the prior day. Third-party measurements, which use different methodologies than the registry, tell the same story: an analysis by Austrian registrar Domaintechnik counted 17,621 new .si domains between September 23 and 29 against 7,209 new .ai registrations — about 2.4 times as many — as the measured zone grew 8.5 percent in ten days.

Who is buying? For now, overwhelmingly speculators rather than users. Netcraft found that about 52 percent of the .si names registered through Dynadot between September 19 and 22 were already listed for resale; Dynadot alone manages 33,572 .si domains, roughly 12.8 percent of the measured zone. Domain Name Wire found no Product Hunt startups launching on .si in the preceding 30 days, while dozens launched on .ai. Hostinger — whose figures are self-reported and not independently verified — told TechCrunch that .si became its second most popular extension after .com, with about 4,300 registrations on September 30 and 5,400 on October 1, more than half the buyers coming from the United States and India. Only around 3 percent of those names are explicitly AI-related; most are "unclassified." One buyer, Genius PR CEO Kim Than, said he registered his company's .si to protect the brand "in case this takes off like .ai," adding: "We think it's the new AI boom."

The economics explain the gold-rush math. Register.si charges registrars about €10 per domain per year; on Hostinger a .si name retails around $12, against roughly $90 a year for .ai — which also requires a two-year commitment. That cheapness is exactly why Slovenia will not repeat Anguilla's windfall. The Caribbean territory, whose .ai suffix became the default namespace of the entire AI industry, earned about $85.3 million from .ai registrations in 2025, according to figures from its finance ministry. Domain Name Wire estimated the entire September surge is worth roughly €300,000 in additional registry revenue, and Register.si has rejected reports that the boom is generating millions for the country. "For Anguilla, .ai became a second economy. For Slovenia, .si is a nice bonus," Klaudijus Januitis, Hostinger's head of domains, told TechCrunch. He expects demand to keep growing but does not see .si replacing .ai — it is, for now, "a more available and more affordable second option."

There is a generous helping of irony in the geography: First Lady Melania Trump is Slovenian, making the .si coincidence a genuinely awkward gift to her husband's adopted brand. The White House's own rollout did not help — observers online mocked the published signature page after spotting that "United States" had been misspelled beneath the president's signature. And the boom faces a technical ceiling: Google treats .si as geographically targeted at Slovenia, which is why domain industry veterans advise businesses to keep a .com or .ai as their primary address. Whether .si becomes a lasting namespace or another short-lived registration rush depends on the question the registration statistics cannot answer — whether "Super Intelligence" becomes common terminology beyond the US federal government, and whether real companies start building on the two letters. Anguilla's .ai proved a country code can acquire a global second meaning. Slovenia has the attention; it is still waiting for the users.