A technology boss from the US has said he paid $700,000 for a domain name earlier this year.
Dharmesh Shah spent the money to get the domain name “you.ai” for his AI website.
Domain names usually only cost between $10 and $20 per year. But Shah had to buy his domain name from the Caribbean island of Anguilla (pronounced “ang-WEE-luh”).
When domain names were first created, countries and territories around the world got their own domains that could be used by local businesses and organizations. For example, Canadian domain names may end with “.ca,” while those from Japan usually end with “.jp.”
Anguilla is owned by the UK, but it didn’t get the domain “.co.uk” used by other websites from Great Britain. Instead, it got “.ai.”
At the time domain names were first invented — in the 1980s and 1990s — artificial intelligence did exist, but not quite in the same way we know it now.
So nobody cared about Anguilla’s domain name. But since ChatGPT was released in late 2022, that’s all changed — and it’s been good news for the small island.
According to the BBC, there were fewer than 50,000 domain names ending with “.ai” in 2020. Now there are more than 850,000.
And Anguilla can set the price. The government says it earned $39 million from selling domain names in 2024, and it expects that to increase to more than $50 million in 2026.
That’s a lot of money for Anguilla, which has a population of fewer than 16,000. Most of its income comes from tourism.
However, speaking to Business Insider, Shah — the man who spent the $700,000 — said he doesn’t expect “.ai” domain names to stay valuable for a long time.
“I think .com domains will end up holding their value better,” he said.
