You’ve probably seen the stories.
Someone bought a short, catchy “.ai” domain years ago for almost nothing, then sold it for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, once every AI startup on earth wanted an “.ai” web address. That domain ending belongs to a tiny Caribbean island called Anguilla.
Nobody there designed it to represent artificial intelligence. It just happened to spell out those two letters, and the tech world ran with it.
Now something similar is happening with “.si,” and it did not start with Trump this week. It started months earlier.
“.si” is the official web address ending for Slovenia, a small country in Europe but back in June 2026, domain investors noticed something interesting.
An AI startup called Recursive, worth $4.65 billion and founded by former top researchers from Salesforce, OpenAI, Google, and Meta, paid $20,000 for the domain Recursive.si.
Around the same time, people discovered that Microsoft already owned copilot.si.
Investors began buying up thousands of short “.si” names, betting that “SI” would eventually stand for “super intelligence” the same way “.ai” came to stand for artificial intelligence.
So when Trump stood at the UN this week and told the world that America will now officially call AI “super intelligence,” he wasn’t starting a new trend. He was pouring fuel on one that domain investors had already lit.
From this point forward, all United States documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term: “super,” as opposed to “artificial.” In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. – Trump
When a country’s president says something on the world stage, it gives an idea legitimacy, whether he meant to or not.
A domain trend that used to live only in investor forums and niche blogs just got mentioned, indirectly, by the President of the United States, in front of every world leader and every major news outlet.
That kind of attention tends to bring in buyers who were not paying attention before, the same way “.ai” prices jumped every time a major AI story went viral.
Will prices actually go up? Based on what’s already happening, probably yes, at least in the short term.
Domain companies have already reported a jump in “.si” registrations since May 2026, and short, brandable names are the ones getting snapped up fastest.
Registrars and domain resellers make money either way, whether someone buys a domain to build a real company or just to sit on it and resell later, so expect them to lean into the “SI” narrative in their marketing, the same way they leaned hard into “.ai” a few years back but there are real differences worth knowing before anyone gets too excited.
Unlike “.ai,” which Anguilla essentially let the world adopt freely, “.si” comes with rules. It’s managed by Slovenia’s official registry, and under European data protection laws, buyers can’t hide their identity behind private registration the way they can with many other domain endings.
That alone will slow down some of the more anonymous, speculative buying that drove wild price swings in the “.ai” boom.
There’s also a simple truth that gets lost in these gold rush stories.
Most people rushing to buy “.si” domains right now are not building AI companies. They’re domain investors hoping to resell to someone who is.
That’s exactly what happened with “.ai” too, and it worked out for early buyers precisely because real AI companies eventually needed those names and were willing to pay.
Whether that repeats with “.si” depends on whether “super intelligence” actually becomes the term the industry settles on, or whether it fades out as just another Trump headline that people move past in a few weeks.
So the honest answer is this. There’s a real trend here, not just hype invented this week but it was already forming quietly before Trump ever mentioned it, and his speech is more likely to accelerate an existing wave than create a brand new one.
If you’re thinking about buying a “.si” domain because of this, go in knowing it’s still early, still speculative, and still depends entirely on whether “SI” actually replaces “AI” in everyday use, not just in one presidential speech.
