A presidential renaming exercise has turned Slovenia’s internet domain into one of the hottest pieces of digital real estate around. Following President Trump’s executive order rebranding artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence,” or SI, domain speculators have piled into .si web addresses, the country-code domain belonging to Slovenia.
The rebrand itself reflects no technological change. The systems are the same chatbots, image generators and coding tools they were before the order. Trump has argued that the word “artificial” makes the technology sound fake when it is not. There is an awkward wrinkle for anyone in the field, though. Superintelligence already has a specific meaning in AI research, describing hypothetical systems that surpass human intelligence across the board, something no current model can claim.
That has not stopped parts of the industry from playing along. Elon Musk says he will rename his AI company again, this time from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. A group of AI executives also met Trump as part of the announcement and signed a non-binding pledge to regulate themselves, a commitment with no enforcement mechanism behind it.
The domain rush is where things get murkier. Independent journalist Adam Cochran has alleged that insiders profited from advance knowledge of the rebrand, pointing to more than 10,000 AI-related .si registrations in recent months. He also noted that a batch of patriotic and pro-MAGA domains, including 1776.si, were registered on the same day as thousands of AI-related ones, weeks before the announcement. Those allegations remain unproven. The White House and Slovenia’s domain operator have both denied wrongdoing, and no purchases have been directly tied to Trump or his associates. Registration details are also hard to trace, since the largest bulk registrar for .si addresses keeps ownership information private.
What is clear is that money is changing hands. AI.si has reportedly been listed for around $700,000, while some .si domains have reportedly sold for more than $1 million. Slovenia, the home country of First Lady Melania Trump, sees little direct benefit, since the proceeds go to the registrar rather than the national treasury.
It is not the first time a small nation’s domain has been caught up in a tech trend. Anguilla’s .ai suffix became a major revenue source for the territory during the AI boom, and Tuvalu has long profited from .tv. The difference here is that the .si gold rush was sparked by a political naming decision rather than organic industry demand.
Whether SI sticks beyond official channels is the real question. If developers and the public keep saying AI, those expensive domains could age very badly.
