A small island nation in the Caribbean, Anguilla, is making millions off artificial intelligence through its .ai domain name. In 1995, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority delegated the .ai domain to Anguilla as part of a routine global rollout of country-code domains. The domain was originally for island-based websites but was later opened to the rest of the world for a registration fee. By 2018, the island was registering nearly 50,000 .ai domains a year, earning $2.9 million total. The surge began after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. By April 2026, Anguilla was registering more than 1.22 million domains a year, a more than twentyfold jump, according to data from Domaintechnik. Large companies like Anthropic, Elon Musk’s x.ai, and Google use .ai domains. Google has also helped the surge by refusing to treat .ai as a foreign domain, allowing .ai sites to show up in global search results. Just eight years ago, Anguilla made $2.9 million off its domain, under 4% of the government’s budget, but by 2025, that figure rocketed to somewhere.