The History of the .ai Domain: How a Caribbean Island Cashed In (While Tuvalu Gave Its .tv Away)

The .ai domain is Anguilla's country-code top-level domain (ccTLD), the same category as .uk for the United Kingdom or .au for Australia. Every country got one of these two-letter codes in the mid-1990s, based on the ISO 3166 list, mostly for local use. Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory of about 15,000 people in the Caribbean, was assigned .ai almost by accident of alphabet, not because anyone anticipated an artificial intelligence boom decades later. Jon Postel, one of the internet's founding administrators, reportedly asked American developer Vince Cate in the mid-1990s if he wanted to run it, since nobody else had claimed it. Cate said yes, transferred the official contact to the Anguillan government, and then quietly operated the registry himself for the next three decades, long before "AI" meant anything to most of the world.

For most of its history, .ai was a niche, low-volume registry. Cate built his own registry software, ran support by email and phone, and gave the Anguillan government roughly 75% of what came in. In the early years that wasn't much: a handful of local businesses registered addresses like company.com.ai, and the whole operation stayed small enough for one person to manage alongside other work. As late as 2017, the year the "Attention Is All You Need" paper introduced the transformer architecture behind modern AI, Anguilla's total revenue from .ai domains was around $1 million. There was no team, no call center, and no marketing budget behind it. It was one person, a modest side project for a tiny government, sitting on a two-letter code that happened to spell out a term nobody was searching for yet.

That changed within months of ChatGPT's public release in November 2022. Startups building AI products wanted domains that signaled exactly what they did, and .ai delivered that instantly: Stability.ai, Character.ai, and hundreds of others snapped up the extension almost overnight. Cate told reporters that sales roughly quadrupled in the five months after ChatGPT launched, a pace the registry had never seen in its previous 27 years combined. Registrations went from under 50,000 in 2020 to hundreds of thousands within a few years, and Anguilla's .ai revenue jumped from about $8.3 million in 2022 to an estimated $32 million in 2023, then roughly $39 million in 2024. At its peak, .ai domain fees accounted for close to a quarter of the Anguillan government's entire annual revenue, funding infrastructure and public services for an island most of the world had never heard of before their AI startup needed a domain name.

The windfall exposed a real operational problem: a national revenue stream this size was still running on infrastructure built for a hobby-scale registry, managed largely by one man working alongside a small team. In 2025, management of the .ai registry shifted to Identity Digital, a professional domain registry operator, which took over the technical and operational running of .ai going forward. Anguilla didn't sell the domain or lose ownership of it, since a ccTLD legally belongs to its country under ICANN rules regardless of who operates it day to day. What it gave up was direct hands-on control, in exchange for a revenue-sharing arrangement reported at around 90% to the government and 10% to Identity Digital. It reads less like "giving away the goldmine" and more like hiring a professional operator once a one-person shop could no longer keep pace with global demand.

Tuvalu's .tv domain is the cautionary version of this same story. In 1998, the Tuvaluan government leased the rights to .tv to a Canadian entrepreneur for a promised $50 million over 12 years, and the deal was later sold on to a company that Verisign acquired in 2001, netting Tuvalu about $10 million in that sale. Verisign then ran .tv commercially for the next two decades, marketing it heavily to streaming and video sites like Twitch, while paying Tuvalu a fraction of what it earned: reports put Verisign's annual profit from the registry at roughly $20 million against a $5 million yearly payment to Tuvalu. The government renegotiated with GoDaddy in 2021 for a reportedly better split, but for years, the country that owned the domain earned far less than the company that sold it.

The lesson from both stories is the same: a domain is worth exactly what people are willing to pay to be associated with it, and whoever controls the registration process captures most of that value. Anguilla kept control of .ai and, even after outsourcing operations, still keeps the vast majority of the money. Tuvalu leased .tv away early and spent years watching a middleman keep the larger share. Country-code domains aren't just internet trivia, they're proof that a short, memorable web address can carry real economic weight on its own. On a much smaller scale, the same idea applies to an individual's professional identity online. Talib gives job seekers and freelancers a live portfolio on a .me domain, at yourname.talib.me, generated from a resume PDF in about two minutes, so a personal brand has a real home without anyone needing to register or manage a domain themselves.