Donald Trump’s surprise “SI” announcement causes domain gold rush as Melania Trump’s birth country sees over a 100X increase in interest in Super Intelligence domain names | Daily Reports Online
- Register.si logged 46,066 new .si domains in September 2026 compared with 3,515 in August after Trump said the US would call AI “superintelligence”
- Registrations have continued to accelerate to over 12,600+ a day at the time of writing, as an increasing number of registrants lock in key domain names with the registrar
- The rename was telegraphed by Truth Social polls from September 19, and Netcraft found speculative .si buying happening before the speech aired
Slovenia’s national domain registry has spent the past two weeks absorbing a wave of demand thanks to an unexpected boon.
US President Donald Trump recently told the UN General Assembly that the United States would now call artificial intelligence “super intelligence,” or SI, because the word artificial “makes it sound fake.”
This has prompted buyers around the world to pile into .si, the country code of the small European nation where First Lady Melania Trump was born.
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An unintended co-incidence?
The First Lady was born in Novo Mesto in 1970, when Slovenia was still a Yugoslav republic, and Netcraft notes that she and Barron Trump both hold Slovenian citizenship. The coincidence ironically exists only because Slovenia was assigned SI when SL had already gone to Sierra Leone.
Register.si, in a screengrab of the site, registered only 3,515 domains in August 2026, while one day saw the website register as many as 12,491 across 92 domain registrars, even as the site shows 46,066 registrations at the time of writing, indicating an impressive 13.1x increase monthly or pro-rated, a 106x increase when compared with an average day in August.
The monthly numbers might be even more impressive if one considers the statement of the Register.si spokeswoman, Klara Herman, to the BBC, where she stated that “44,000 web addresses with the .si suffix had been registered in September, compared to less than 2,000 in August – an increase of more than 2,100%”.
One could, however, argue this isn’t a complete surprise: on September 19, Trump posted a poll on Truth Social offering Superior, Extreme, or Supreme Intelligence as replacements for AI, two of which abbreviate to SI.
On September 21, he promised in a post that he would “only encourage AI or SI (SUPER INTELLIGENCE)!”, and a second poll pitting super against superior intelligence drew more than 50,000 votes. This also sparked a betting spree: a Polymarket contract on whether Trump would rename AI by September 30 opened on September 20 and drew $151,000 in bets by September 23.
The obvious beneficiary for now seems to be the state of Slovenia, though at a limited scale; Register.si still charges every registrar the same €10 per domain, and the registry has said media speculation about millions in earnings for Slovenia has “no real basis”.
Domain Name Wire estimated roughly €300,000 in additional September revenue for the state, though that number may be dated, given the current total stands at 46,066 domains or €460,660 and may be even higher. Anguilla, by contrast, earned around $32 million from .ai in 2023, more than 20% of government revenue, according to IMF figures cited by Foreign Policy,
The less obvious, but considerably more lucrative, play is speculative buying of potentially high-value domain names should the trend catch on, to flip for a high multiple (100x, 1000x, or even higher in certain cases) on transfer.
The more interesting question is what SI could eventually mean, and whether it is one used by the rest of the world. The White House fact sheet says the order directs agencies to use Super Intelligence and SI in official communications and “to no longer acknowledge” the old terms, but it applies only to executive branch documents outside statute. It has no say in whether the nomenclature actually catches up with or replaces AI in an industry that has far more pressing concerns to address than its own name.
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