Any mention of Slovenia brings to mind thick forests, historic cities and Alpine peaks. Now add “super intelligence” to the list. Ever since US President Donald Trump “inaugurated the era of super intelligence”, or SI, and officially renamed artificial intelligence, interest in the .si domain name has surged.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) oversees the root zone for country-code top-level domains such as .uk (United Kingdom), .us (United States) and .in (India). Slovenia’s country code is .si. It is used by the likes of RTV Slovenija, the national public broadcaster, and by the country’s central government administration portal.
Since Trump’s announcement, demand for .si domain names has spiked. Register.si, the organisation that manages Slovenia’s domains, told the BBC that purchases of .si domain names rose by nearly 2,200 per cent in September. Spokeswoman Klara Herman said 44,000 web addresses with the .si suffix were registered in September, compared with fewer than 2,000 in August.
The spokeswoman did not completely attribute the jump to Trump’s latest move. However, 11,000 new registrations were recorded on September 30 alone, the day after Trump signed Executive Order 14434. In a statement on its website, Register.si advises “holders of trademarks,
slogans, companies, who
do not yet have a domain under .si to register it as soon as possible”.
Interest in country domain names is nothing new. At the start of the AI boom, Anguilla found itself in the spotlight as more and more people had bought .ai domain names.
The value of such domain names also came to the fore when Britain first agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in 2024. The tropical archipelago, which lies just south of the equator in the Indian Ocean, south of the tip of India, was given the IO country code and allocated the matching .io (Indian Ocean) domain in 1997. The domain became popular in the digital economy because the initials stand for input/output, the process of sending and receiving data. Many cryptocurrency companies selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) use .io web addresses.
Hostinger, a popular web-hosting provider that helps individuals and businesses build, launch and manage websites, says .si has become one of its most sought-after domains after .com. At the time of writing, Hostinger listed .si domain names from ₹1,169 for one year while .ai domains started at ₹8,718 for two years.
The chances of .si becoming popular are high, as Trump is likely to push super intelligence further in his remaining two years in the White House. His executive order states: “The capabilities of today’s frontier systems do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence. They increasingly amplify human ingenuity and unlock new forms of creativity, empowering Americans to achieve what was previously impossible across science, medicine and nearly every other domain of human endeavour.” Last month he also hosted top technology CEOs at what he called “an extraordinary gathering” of the minds “building America’s Golden Age”.
To an extent, search engines such as Google changed the role of domain names long ago. Getting around online once meant typing a web address into a browser. Today a search engine does that job, and with the rise of chatbots, the role of search engines is changing too. Even so, domain names still matter as digital identifiers and brands, and among Internet addresses, .com remains the giant.
Trump may not be thinking about .si, but Slovenia has one connection he cannot ignore — Melanija Knavs, now US First Lady Melania Trump. She was born in 1970 in Novo Mesto in what is now Slovenia, and her family later moved to nearby Sevnica.
The town has made the most of its famous ambassador in the past. She has inspired coffee and chocolate, all cleverly branded to avoid trademark claims.