Trump's AI rebrand causes Slovenian website demand surge
Slovenian .si web addresses surged over 2,100% in September after Donald Trump proposed renaming AI to super intelligence or SI.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Slovenian .si web addresses surged over 2,100% in September
- Registrations jumped from under 2,000 to 44,000 websites
- Trump proposed renaming AI to Super Intelligence or SI
- Experts suggest the surge may involve speculative domain investing
A sudden digital frenzy has erupted across the internet after US President Donald Trump announced a push to rename artificial intelligence, arguing that the word artificial makes the technology sound fake and advocating for the term Super Intelligence or SI instead. This exact abbreviation happens to match the official internet country code top-level domain extension .si for Slovenia, triggering an unprecedented wave of website registrations.
Klara Herman, a spokeswoman for Register.si, revealed startling figures showing that 44,000 web addresses utilizing the .si suffix were registered during September alone, compared to fewer than 2,000 in August, marking a staggering increase of over 2,100%. She noted that on September 30th alone, 11,000 new registrations were recorded, describing the overall scale of activity in late September as unprecedented compared to the preceding twelve months.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
The push for renaming the technology was originally introduced on September 11 during Trump's speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. According to the directive, SI will officially replace AI in official correspondence, websites, reports, and other forms of communication, instantly sparking global interest due to the linguistic overlap with Slovenian web domains.
"The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake."
Donald Trump
Observers point out that one plausible driver behind these massive purchases is speculative domain registration, a practice where individuals buy specific web addresses early on in hopes that their market value will appreciate, allowing them to resell them for a substantial profit later. A historical precedent occurred in 1997 when Rick Schwartz, famously known as The Domain King, purchased the domain men.com for 15,000 dollars or roughly 11,300 pounds, only to sell it for 1.32 million dollars seven years down the line.
Domain name speculation has been a common practice since the early days of the internet. Whenever a new acronym, catchphrase, or major policy shift enters the global lexicon, opportunistic investors race to secure matching domain names before corporate entities can claim them. Because .si is the official country code for Slovenia, it unexpectedly became the primary beneficiary of speculative buying driven by the American president's new terminology.
Source: BBC Business
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