Slovenia's .si country domain grew from about 190,000 registered names on September 4, 2026 to 257,146 on October 2, 2026. That is roughly 35% growth in four weeks, for an extension that took 30 years to reach 150,000. The trigger was a US executive order renaming artificial intelligence "Super Intelligence (SI)". The wholesale price is still EUR 10 a year.
That is the whole story in three sentences. The rest of this article is the evidence, the money, the risks, and our own view on where .si goes from here.
Here's the thing. Most coverage of .si right now is either a Slovenian news brief or a domain-investor hype thread. Neither one gives you the full picture. This one does, with every number sourced.
What you will learn
- The exact timeline that turned a quiet ccTLD into a 12,000-registrations-a-day market
- Registry data, not estimates, on how fast .si is growing
- What .si actually costs compared with .ai, and why that gap matters
- Who is buying (hint: mostly not startups yet) and what they have paid
- The .ai precedent, with Anguilla's real revenue figures
- Three realistic futures for .si and the dates that will decide them
- Our take: why we think the price and the rename are both bullish, and what would prove us wrong
The timeline: ten days that changed a country code
Everything in the .si market traces back to a handful of dates.
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1 April 1992 | .si enters the DNS root. Slovenia gets "SI" because "SL" was already taken by Sierra Leone. | Register.si via STA |
| 23 July 2025 | At a Washington AI summit Trump says of the term artificial intelligence: "I can't stand it. I don't even like the name." | Public remarks |
| 11 June 2026 | Domain Name Wire reports investors are already buying .si as shorthand for "superintelligence". 35 public sales so far in 2026. | Domain Name Wire |
| 19 Sept 2026 | Trump posts a Truth Social poll offering "Superior", "Extreme" or "Supreme" Intelligence as new names for AI. "Super" is not an option. | Anadolu Agency |
| 21 Sept 2026 | Second poll: "Super" vs "Superior" Intelligence. "Super" wins by about 30 points. | The New Republic |
| 22 Sept 2026 | At the UN General Assembly Trump says US documents will use "Super Intelligence, SI". | UN speech, widely reported |
| 29 Sept 2026 | Executive order "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence" signed. Federal agencies must use "SI" and "Super Intelligence" and "will not acknowledge" the terms "AI" and "Artificial Intelligence". | whitehouse.gov |
| ~28 Nov 2026 | Deadline for the White House science adviser to propose a federal legal definition of "Super Intelligence". | Executive order, Sec. 3 |
Here is the moment the world heard it:
Trump tells the UN he is officially changing the name of Artificial Intelligence to "Super Intelligence" and says all US government documents will now be changed to refer to "SI"
Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) · September 22, 2026
Two letters. One speech. And a small Alpine country's domain extension suddenly had a second meaning.
The numbers: what the registry actually shows
Register.si, run by Slovenia's Academic and Research Network (ARNES), publishes live counters. Here is what they and independent trackers recorded.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Daily registrations, 2023 to 2025 | About 55 to 110 per day | Register.si data cited by Computerworld and Adam Cochran |
| Registrations in August 2026 | 3,515 | Register.si |
| Registrations in September 2026 | 46,066 | Register.si |
| September growth vs August | About 13x | Netcraft |
| Total domains, 4 Sept 2026 | About 190,000 | Register.si archive via Domain Name Wire |
| Total domains, 22 Sept 2026 | 198,535 | Register.si via Netcraft |
| Total domains, 1 Oct 2026 | 241,459 | Register.si via CircleID |
| Total domains, 2 Oct 2026 | 257,146 | Register.si live counter |
| New domains, last 24 hours (2 Oct) | 12,645 | Register.si live counter |
| Registrars offering .si | 92 | Register.si |
For context, .si hit 80,000 names in 2010, 100,000 in 2012 and 150,000 in 2022. It added more names in the last week of September 2026 than in some entire years of its history.
Bottom line: this is not a rounding error or a bot spike. It is the largest growth event in the extension's 34-year history, and it is still accelerating as of today.
Netcraft, which tracks domain registrations across the internet, found that .si registrations overtook .ai registrations in the 25 hours after the UN speech. Austrian registrar Domaintechnik counted 17,621 new .si names between September 23 and 29, against 7,209 new .ai names. That is 2.4 .si registrations for every .ai registration during that week.
Registry spokesperson Klara Herman told the BBC the September activity was "unprecedented" compared with the previous 12 months, though she was "cautious" about attributing all of it to Trump's remarks.
The price: EUR 10 vs $160
This is the part most articles skip, and it is the part that matters most.
| .si (Slovenia) | .ai (Anguilla) | |
|---|---|---|
| Wholesale price to registrars | EUR 10 per year | $160 for a mandatory 2-year minimum |
| Typical retail price | EUR 12 to 13 (about $12 at Hostinger) | About $90 per year, 2-year commitment |
| Minimum term | 1 year | 2 years |
| Maximum term | 5 years | Varies by registrar |
| Who can register | Anyone, anywhere. No residency, no paperwork. | Anyone |
| Registry operator | ARNES, a Slovenian public institution | Identity Digital under contract with Anguilla's government since January 2025 |
| Registered domains | 257,146 | About 1.44 million |
Sources: Register.si tariff (valid from 1 January 2023), Domain Name Wire, TechCrunch, Domaintechnik.
Let me explain why this gap is the whole thesis.
A .si domain costs about one-seventh of a .ai domain at retail, and about one-sixteenth at wholesale. The registry's general terms require 30 days' public notice before any price change, and the current tariff has been unchanged since January 2023. There is no premium-name tier and no auction system for dictionary words. A name is either taken or it is EUR 10.
Compare that with .ai, where Anguilla raised prices and the registry collected EC$230 million (US$85.3 million) in 2025. That was 47% of Anguilla's entire national budget. In the first half of 2026 alone, .ai brought in EC$196.8 million.
Slovenia has made no such move. The registry's own statement on the surge said speculation about "millions of euros for Slovenia" has "no real basis", because the registry's cut is fixed at EUR 10 and retail pricing is up to each registrar. Our arithmetic: 46,066 September registrations at EUR 10 is about EUR 460,000 of registry revenue. Hostinger's head of domains, Klaudijus Januitis, put it to TechCrunch this way: "For Anguilla, .ai became a second economy. For Slovenia, .si is a nice bonus."
What this means for you: the entry price is fixed, public and low. Whatever happens to the "SI" term, the downside on a single registration is EUR 12 a year.
Who is buying: investors first, companies second
Now for the uncomfortable truth that the hype threads leave out.
Most of the September demand is speculative. Here is the evidence:
- 52% listed for resale within days. Netcraft found that about 52% of .si domains registered through Dynadot between the September 19 poll and the September 22 speech were on Dynadot's aftermarket by September 23. Examples included donaldjtrump.si, boeing.si, superintell.si and unitedstate.si.
- One registrar holds 12.8% of the zone. Domaintechnik reports Dynadot alone manages 33,572 .si names. Dynadot is the registrar of choice for bulk investors because it has a built-in resale marketplace.
- Zero startup launches. Leanne Mac, who tracks the domains used by Product Hunt launches, found no startup launching on a .si domain in the 30 days to October 1. On that single day, 50 launches used .ai.
- 16 buyers, one of them 43%. Domain Name Wire's June analysis of 35 recorded .si sales found 16 distinct buyers. A single investor in China accounted for 43% of all public sales in 2026 to that point.
But wait. Two sales stand out as genuine end users:
- Recursive.si, $20,000 (Spaceship, May 2026). The buyer is Recursive, the AI lab founded by Richard Socher (former Salesforce Chief Scientist, founder of You.com) that came out of stealth in May 2026 with $650 million in funding at a $4.65 billion valuation. Its stated mission is self-improving AI on the path to superintelligence. The domain currently redirects to recursive.com.
- Military.si, $1,795. Bought by the company behind the Polish military supply store Militaria.pl.
So the honest picture is: one well-funded superintelligence lab has paid five figures for its .si name, and nobody else of note has yet.
The asking prices vs the real prices
You will see headlines about .si domains "worth millions". Read them carefully.
Slovenian business outlet Lider.si checked the registry's RDAP records against the sales pages:
| Domain | Asking price | Registered |
|---|---|---|
| build.si | $10,000,000 | 18 Dec 2025 |
| seed.si | $8,000,000 | 15 Jul 2026 |
| beautiful.si | $5,000,000 | 25 May 2025 |
| coding.si, predict.si, engineer.si | $5,000,000 each | 2024 to 2026 |
| swift.si, macro.si | $5,000,000 each | 19 Sept 2026, hours before the poll |
| 13 domains combined | $70,500,000 |
Not one of these has sold at those prices. The only recorded sale of build.si is $17,435 on June 3, 2026 via fruits.co, according to NameBio. Every verified .si sale on record is a four- or five-figure transaction. The record is Recursive.si at $20,000.
Which means: the "millions" are wish lists, not market prices.
The insider-trading allegation
Within a day of the executive order, a thread on X went viral alleging that the whole rename was engineered so insiders could profit from .si domains.
1/15 SCOOP: Trump’s "Super Intelligence" Scandal: I believe Trump’s "SI" Executive Order was ANOTHER criminal plot to enrich the Trump family. Insiders seem to have profited MILLIONS off of .si domain names before his Truth Social posts.
Adam Cochran (@adamscochran) · September 30, 2026
Cochran's thread points to registrations climbing from June 2026 (more than 400 in a single day on June 24, more than 7,000 in July) and to pro-US names like 1776.si being registered on the same day as thousands of AI-themed names.
Here is what the evidence actually supports, and what it does not:
- Supported: registrations did rise months before the poll. Domain Name Wire documented investor buying in June. Register.si's own monthly chart, cited by Snopes, shows spikes of about 5,000 in both May and June 2026.
- Supported: "superintelligence" was already a live term in AI circles. Mark Zuckerberg published a long essay on "personal superintelligence" in summer 2025, and Recursive branded itself around the word in May 2026. Investors did not need a tip-off to bet on it.
- Not supported: any link between buyers and the Trump family or administration. Dynadot keeps WHOIS private. Snopes left the claim unrated for lack of primary evidence. Netcraft said it "cannot determine whether registrants were acting on anticipation of the announcement or unrelated factors".
- Not supported: "hundreds of millions" in profits. Recorded sales are in the low five figures.
We include the thread because it is part of the story and because it drove a measurable second wave of registrations. We do not endorse its conclusion.
The .ai precedent, with real numbers
Every .si bull case rests on one comparison: .ai did it, so .si can too. Let's test that.
| Year | .ai registered domains |
|---|---|
| 2018 | ~48,000 |
| 2020 | ~86,000 |
| 2022 | ~144,000 |
| 2023 | ~354,000 |
| 2024 | ~570,000 |
| 2025 | ~1,000,000 |
| Sept 2026 | ~1,440,000 |
Source: Domaintechnik, "The .ai Domain Boom".
.ai revenue for Anguilla went from US$2.9 million in 2018 to US$39 million in 2024 to US$85.3 million in 2025. The 2026 run rate is higher again.
Notice what drove it. Nobody renamed anything. The whole planet already said "AI". ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and .ai registrations rose 145% the following year because thousands of founders wanted the two letters everyone was already typing.
.si's situation is different in two ways:
- The term "SI" is currently a US federal usage, not a global one. A YouGov poll reported by Axios found 53% of Americans still prefer "artificial intelligence" against 9% for "super intelligence".
- The demand so far is from investors anticipating adoption, not from companies adopting.
It is also different in two ways that favour .si:
- Price. .ai was never cheap. .si is one of the cheapest two-letter ccTLDs on earth with zero restrictions.
- Supply. With 257,000 names, .si has about one-sixth as many registered domains as .ai. Short, meaningful names that would cost five or six figures in .ai are still available at registration price in .si.
Three futures for .si
Scenario 1: The spike fades
"SI" stays a federal-government term. Private companies, the press and other governments keep saying AI. The 60-day definition proposal lands in late November, Congress does nothing with it, and the term quietly fades.
What happens to .si: the real test comes between September and October 2027, when the September 2026 registrations come up for renewal. Speculators drop names that did not sell. The zone falls back toward 200,000 to 230,000. Slovenia keeps a slightly larger extension and a modest one-time revenue bump.
This is the base case most domain-industry veterans are quietly pricing in. One Domain Name Wire commenter compared it to "flowers.mobi", the poster child of a hyped extension that went nowhere.
Scenario 2: A real but secondary AI niche
AI companies register .si defensively and as redirects, the way Recursive has. Some new superintelligence-focused labs use it as a primary brand because the matching .ai is unavailable or costs six figures. A steady aftermarket forms at $2,000 to $50,000 for good one-word names. The zone keeps growing at a few thousand names a day, then settles into a higher plateau.
Hostinger's Januitis is effectively forecasting this: he expects .si demand to keep growing but does not see it replacing .ai, describing it as "a more available and more affordable second option".
Scenario 3: The .ai playbook repeats
The term "superintelligence" keeps spreading on its own momentum. Frontier labs lean into it (several already have "superintelligence" in their mission statements). Jensen Huang has already called data centres "super intelligence factories". If the industry's own language shifts, .si becomes the natural home for a generation of companies, and Slovenia faces the same choices Anguilla did: raise prices, introduce premium tiers, or hand the registry to a commercial operator.
ARNES has signalled none of this. Its terms require 30 days' notice for any change, so you would see it coming.
Our take
Here is where we step off the fence, and we will tell you exactly why.
We think the pricing is the single most underrated fact in this story. A fixed EUR 10 wholesale price, with no premium tiers, on a two-letter extension that now has a globally recognised meaning, is an anomaly. In every comparable case (.ai, .io, .co, .tv) the registry eventually monetised demand. The window where a meaningful .si name costs the same as a parking ticket is open now and will not stay open if Scenario 2 or 3 plays out.
We also think the rename is good for .si regardless of whether you like the politics. Here's why. The US federal government is the largest single publisher of policy documents on the planet. Every grant notice, procurement request, agency report and White House release from now on will say "SI". The term "superintelligence" was already rising inside the AI industry before any politician touched it. Government usage does not create a brand on its own, but it does give an existing term a daily, official, global megaphone. That is more than .ai ever had.
What would prove us wrong: if, by the 2027 renewal cycle, Product Hunt launches on .si are still at zero, if no second company has paid five figures for a .si name, and if the federal definition proposal stalls in Congress, then Scenario 1 wins and the extension settles back to being Slovenia's.
What we are not saying: we are not saying buy .si names at aftermarket prices. The recorded ceiling is $20,000. Anyone asking $10 million for build.si is asking, not selling. The asymmetric bet is at registration price, not at resale price.
What to do about it
If you own a brand, a product name or a company name, register the matching .si now. It costs about EUR 12 and the registry's dispute process (ADR) is slower and more expensive than a registration. Register.si itself has advised exactly this: that trademark and brand owners "register one as soon as possible".
If you are building anything in AI, check whether your name is free in .si. If it is, EUR 12 is cheaper than the conversation you will have with a squatter in 2027.
If you are a domain investor, the registration-price window is the trade. Check the registry's RDAP for a name's history before paying a premium: as Lider.si showed, many "premium" .si names were registered in the last twelve months by the people now selling them.
If you are a Spanish-speaking brand, you have a second reason that has nothing to do with AI: "sí" means "yes", and names like compra.si or vamos.si read naturally to half a billion people.
What most coverage leaves out
| Topic | Typical article | This guide |
|---|---|---|
| Growth figures | One headline number | Registry counts on six dates, plus Netcraft and Domaintechnik cross-checks |
| Pricing | ".si is cheap" | Exact wholesale tariff, retail range, minimum terms, 30-day change rule, and the .ai comparison |
| Who is buying | "Investors" | Resale ratio, registrar concentration, Product Hunt data, named end-user sales with prices |
| Asking vs sold | Repeats the $10M headline | RDAP registration dates and the only recorded build.si sale ($17,435) |
| Insider claims | Repeats or ignores | What the evidence supports and what it does not, with Snopes and Netcraft positions |
| The future | "Could be the next .ai" | Three scenarios with the dates that decide them (Nov 2026 definition, Sept 2027 renewals) |
Key takeaways
- .si grew from about 190,000 to 257,146 registered domains between 4 September and 2 October 2026, about 35% in four weeks.
- The trigger was the US executive order of 29 September 2026 replacing "AI" with "Super Intelligence (SI)" in federal usage.
- Wholesale price is EUR 10 a year with no premium tiers, against $160 for a 2-year minimum on .ai.
- Roughly half of early speculative registrations were listed for resale within days. No startup launched on .si in the 30 days to 1 October.
- The highest recorded .si sale is Recursive.si at $20,000. Multi-million-dollar figures are asking prices.
- Slovenia's registry earns about EUR 460,000 from September's registrations and has rejected "millions" claims.
- The decisive dates are late November 2026 (federal definition proposal) and September 2027 (first renewal cycle for the surge).
Frequently asked questions
What is a .si domain?
.si is the country-code top-level domain for Slovenia, administered by ARNES through Register.si since 1992. Anyone in the world can register one.
Why are .si domains suddenly popular?
Because "SI" is now the US federal government's official abbreviation for "Super Intelligence", its replacement term for artificial intelligence, under an executive order signed on 29 September 2026. Investors and some AI companies are buying .si names as the "superintelligence" equivalent of .ai.
How much does a .si domain cost?
The registry charges registrars EUR 10 per year. Retail prices are typically EUR 12 to 13 or about $12. You can register for one to five years. There are no residency requirements.
Is .si the next .ai?
Not yet. .ai has about 1.44 million domains and earned Anguilla US$85.3 million in 2025 because the whole world already said "AI". .si has 257,000 domains and the term "SI" is so far used officially only by the US federal government. The first real test is the 2027 renewal cycle.
What is the most expensive .si domain ever sold?
Recursive.si at $20,000 in May 2026, bought by the AI lab Recursive. Asking prices of $5 million to $10 million for names like build.si and seed.si have not resulted in recorded sales.
Can Slovenia raise .si prices?
Yes. The registry's general terms allow changes to the tariff with at least 30 days' public notice. The current EUR 10 tariff has been in force since 1 January 2023.
Should I register my brand's .si domain?
If the name matters to you, yes. It costs about EUR 12 and Register.si has publicly advised brand owners to register before someone else does.
Sources
- Register.si live statistics and general terms
- Register.si tariff for registrars
- White House executive order, 29 Sept 2026
- Netcraft, ".si registrations outpace .ai"
- Netcraft, "Executive order fuels nearly hundredfold increase"
- Domain Name Wire, 11 June 2026, "Who is buying .si domain names?"
- Domain Name Wire, 1 Oct 2026, "46k .si domains registered in September"
- CircleID, ".si Registrations Surge"
- BBC, "Trump's AI rebrand causes 'unprecedented' demand"
- TechCrunch, 2 Oct 2026
- Computerworld, 2 Oct 2026
- Lider.si, asking prices vs registration dates
- Snopes, 1 Oct 2026
- Domaintechnik, "The .ai Domain Boom"
- Anguilla Focus, .ai H1 2026 revenue
- IAPP on the executive order's legal scope
- NameBio daily sales (Recursive.si, build.si) via NamePros
