Abstract:
U.S. President Trump has recently pushed to rename "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) to "Super Intelligence" (SI). This administrative-level name adjustment has unexpectedly set off a small "gold rush" in the Internet domain name market.
Since the national top-level domain name of Slovenia is ".si", and the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump, was born in Slovenia, a large number of users began to rush to register website domain names ending with ".si", causing this European country with a population of only about 2.1 million to suddenly experience an unusually strong demand for domain name registration.
Trump initially proposed this idea when he attended the United Nations General Assembly and delivered a speech on September 22. He said that the word "Artificial" makes artificial intelligence sound like "fake", so the US government should use the name "Super Intelligence" in the future and shorten it to "SI". Trump also expressed at the time that he hoped the title would eventually be adopted by the world.
This was not just an off-the-cuff statement by Trump in his speech. On September 29, the White House further issued an executive order, formally requiring the U.S. federal executive departments to replace "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" with "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in official communications, publicity, policy documents, and other non-legal government documents. The executive order also requires the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to propose a federal definition of "Super Intelligence."
However, when the abbreviation "SI" came into public view, a very coincidental thing happened: Slovenia happened to have the country's top-level domain name ".si".
Data provided by Slovenia’s national domain name registration agency ARNES show that after Trump’s relevant speech on September 22, the number of “.si” domain name registrations surged rapidly. More than 2,000 domain names were added that day alone, and more than 4,000 were added the next day. The total number of registrations in September therefore exceeded 20,000 for the first time, pushing the total number of ".si" domain names in Slovenia to exceed 200,000 for the first time.
This growth then accelerated further. The latest data shows that the number of ".si" domain name registrations in Slovenia reached approximately 44,000 in September 2026, while there were less than 2,000 in August, an increase of more than 2,100%. Local registries described the huge growth in a short period of time as unprecedented in the past year.
In other words, after seeing Trump calling AI "SI", a large number of Internet users began to register domain names similar to "xxx.si", hoping to occupy domain name resources containing keywords such as AI, intelligence, and technology. For domain name investors, this behavior is very similar to the logic behind how ".ai" domain names became popular in the past due to the artificial intelligence craze.
Slovenia has become a direct beneficiary of this unexpected domain name boom. However, this does not mean that Trump’s decision will bring huge revenue to the Slovenian government.
ARNES is responsible for managing the Register.si domain name registration system, but it does not itself sell every ".si" domain name directly to end users. The agency charges registration fees from about 90 domestic and foreign registrars. The current standard price is 10 euros per registration, and the actual price paid by the end consumer is determined by the specific registrar.
Therefore, although the number of domain name registrations has suddenly increased, most of the fees first flow to commercial registrars that provide registration services, and the revenue that the Slovenian National Domain Name Agency can obtain is only part of it.
In fact, ARNES also reminded the outside world that the impact of this wave of domain name boom on Slovenia's fiscal revenue should not be exaggerated. The agency said there was no basis for media claims that increased demand for ".si" domain names would bring "millions of euros in revenue" to Slovenia. However, the agency also acknowledged that Trump’s discussion of “Super Intelligence” did coincide with the recent unusual growth, and that the international community’s attention to “SI” clearly drove additional registration requirements.
This is an interesting contrast to the previous story about the ".ai" domain name. ".ai" actually belongs to the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla and is not an Internet suffix exclusive to the artificial intelligence industry. As generative AI products such as ChatGPT become rapidly popular after 2022, "AI" has gradually become one of the most important keywords in the technology industry, and a large number of AI start-ups have begun to register ".ai" domain names.
This demand brings a very considerable income to Anguilla. The International Monetary Fund previously disclosed that in 2023 alone, revenue related to ".ai" domain name registration brought approximately US$32 million to Anguilla, equivalent to more than 20% of the local government's annual revenue.
Now that Trump is trying to push “AI” to be renamed “SI”, Slovenia unexpectedly gets a similar opportunity.
Some domain name registrars have been quick to follow this trend. For example, Lithuania-based Hostinger began providing ".si" domain name registration services the day after Trump's speech, and directly used slogans such as "AI is now called superintelligence. Register your .si domain" to attract users to register. The vast majority of recent ".si" orders have been new registrations, rather than users transferring existing sites from other registrars, the company said.
However, unlike ".ai", ".si" has already had a fairly mature usage system, so this wave of craze does not mean that all ".si" domain names have investment value. Slovenian companies, institutions and individuals have been using ".si" domain names for a long time, and this growth mainly comes from international users trying to seize short domain names and popular keywords related to the "SI" concept.
Another interesting coincidence is that Melania Trump was born in Slovenia. After Trump promoted the new name "Super Intelligence", the country domain name of the first lady's home country became the focus of the global technology circle. Therefore, the outside world also began to use "Trump makes his wife's home country make money" to ridicule this unexpected domain name effect.
However, judging from the current data, it is not rigorous to attribute the entire ".si" registration growth entirely to Trump. ARNES made it clear that the number of ".si" domain name registrations had been on the rise before Trump's speech, so not all of the recent growth was caused by the name "Super Intelligence." What is really confirmed is that Trump’s speech coincided with an unusual spike in registrations that followed, and the sudden international focus on the abbreviation “SI” brought additional demand to the domain name market.
At the same time, "Super Intelligence" itself still has a technical concept problem. In the field of artificial intelligence research, "superintelligence" is not a new term that has just emerged, but has long been used to describe hypothetical artificial intelligence with abilities that exceed human levels, which is commonly referred to as "artificial superintelligence." Currently, no AI company has publicly claimed to have achieved true artificial superintelligence.
Therefore, what the Trump administration now calls "Super Intelligence" is not exactly the same thing as the "superintelligence" originally used by academia. The U.S. government’s executive order actually uses a term originally used to describe a potential technological stage as the new official name for artificial intelligence as a whole.
From the actual effect, Trump’s name change currently mainly affects the official language of the US federal government, rather than the entire technology industry. U.S. technology companies, research institutions, and international organizations are not obliged to simultaneously abandon the terms "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" that have been used for decades. As a result, a rather interesting linguistic divide is likely to emerge in the future: US government documents make heavy use of "SI", while technology companies, academic papers and global media continue to use "AI".
Regardless of whether "Super Intelligence" can eventually replace "Artificial Intelligence", this name change has already produced an unexpected result: the ".si" country domain name originally belonging to Slovenia suddenly became connected with the global artificial intelligence industry after Trump's political language adjustment. For Slovenia, it is not known how long this wave of domain name registration boom will last, but at least in a short period of time, Trump did give this small European country’s national top-level domain name a global exposure opportunity that was previously unimaginable.
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