What 34,582 .si domains say about the Super Intelligence rush (and why so few mention AI)

Until a few weeks ago, .si was a quiet country domain used mostly by Slovenian businesses. Then Washington decided AI needed a new name. “Artificial,” turns out, sounds fake. So now we’ve got “Super Intelligence.” Or SI, if you’re feeling fancy.

And so Slovenia, with 2 million people and very reasonably priced domains, found itself in the middle of the AI race without ever signing up for it.

Domain buyers acted fast. Between September 23 and October 7, Hostinger customers alone registered 34,582 new .si top-level domain extensions. Yet of all the new .si names, only about 3% contain an AI term.

What buyers wanted instead were short, flexible names, the kind people buy before they’ve decided what to build. That’s why the next few months will tell us more about .si than the last few weeks did.

What turned curiosity into a buying spree

On September 22, President Trump announced the new name at the UN General Assembly, and we started offering .si the next day. From September 23 to 28, registrations on our platform hovered at a few hundred a day. Curious, but hardly a stampede.

Then, on September 29, an executive order told US federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” in their official communications. Our registrations went from 529 that day to 4,279 on September 30, eight times as many in a single day.

Of the 34,582 .si domains our customers registered by October 7, more than 90% came from September 30 onward.

And the rush kept going. After a quieter weekend, Monday, October 5 set a new record at 5,654 registrations.

A few investors saw this coming

A small group of domain investors had been buying .si names for months before anyone in Washington said “SI” out loud.

The word itself had been around for a while. Philosopher Nick Bostrom popularized the term in his 2014 book titled Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, and AI companies later borrowed it for their names. Safe Superintelligence Inc. launched in June 2024, and Meta followed with Meta Superintelligence Labs.

From there, it was a short hop to “SI,” and an even shorter one to .si.

When Domain Name Wire looked at who was buying .si domains in the first half of the year, it found that of 35 public sales from January to June 9, only two went to companies that planned to use the domain – AI company Recursive, which paid $20,000 for its .si domain, and a Polish military supply store. The rest were almost all investors buying from other sellers

Plenty of early bets like these sit in a portfolio for years, waiting for a reason to matter. For .si, that reason arrived on September 29, and suddenly everyone wanted in.

Who’s buying .si, and who isn’t

If the SI rush has a home base, it’s the United States. Our US customers registered 8,917 .si domains, and Indian customers were right behind with 7,770. Together, the two countries account for nearly half of all .si registrations on our platform.

US buyers also had the biggest appetite on the record day. They registered 1,644 domains on October 5 alone, about 29% of that day’s total.

Then there’s Morocco, which came third with 1,674 domains, ahead of much bigger markets like the UK, the UAE, and Canada. Nobody on our team saw that coming.

Those 1,674 domains came from just 357 customers, an average of 4.7 each and the highest among our top markets, which points to a few busy investors.

As for Slovenia, the country the extension belongs to, it didn’t even crack our top 20.

AI names came a distant third

We sorted the new .si names by topic, half expecting AI to top the list. It didn’t come close.

Short names took first place. Names with four characters or fewer made up 4,062 registrations, about one in eight of the total.

Tech-related names came second at 2,920. Names with explicit AI terms, the whole reason .si was in the news, came third with 1,120, about 3% of the total.

Some of those tech names are probably AI-adjacent, but even if you count every tech and AI name together, fewer than one in eight registrations fall into either group.

Further down the list were finance, energy, health, ecommerce, and education, plus a small cluster of gambling names, because there’s always a small cluster of gambling names.

More than half the domains (58.3%) didn’t fit any topic at all, so these patterns describe the 41.7% we could classify. Our classification looks for recognizable words, so the unclassified pile likely holds invented words, personal names, and names in languages other than English.

Some of those could still be AI projects, since a brand name doesn’t have to mention AI at all.

But it’s clear, short names were the favorite of those we could classify. Names like these can turn into a product, a side project, or a resale listing, and for now, buyers are choosing that flexibility over a clear plan.

Builders, flippers, or both?

Every domain rush attracts two kinds of buyers: people who want a name to use, and people who want a name to sell.

Our 11,623 .si customers registered three .si domains each on average, which isn’t exactly hoarding.

Klaudijus Januitis, Head of Domains at Hostinger, reads that as a mostly ordinary crowd with a busy speculative corner.

“The average customer is registering about three .si names, which tells us this is still mostly end users rather than bulk speculators,” he said.

“There is a speculative element, with a small number of customers registering dozens of short names each, but what we see is generic words rather than brand names, so cybersquatting looks like a small part of this. Brands are also starting to register their .si names to protect them, which is smarter than waiting.”

What the data can’t tell us yet is how many of these names will become real websites. Two weeks is too early to judge, since plenty of people register a name first and get around to building later. Sometimes much later.

Even Recursive, the AI company that paid $20,000 for Recursive.si back in the spring, still sends visitors straight to its .com.

Other country domains with a second meaning

Slovenia joins a small club of countries whose two letters picked up a second meaning in the tech world. Membership hasn’t always worked out, though.

.ai (Anguilla) is the success story. It went from a little-known Caribbean domain to the default address for AI companies, and around 90% of .ai domains renew after their two-year term. It lasted because companies built real products on it, long after the early buyers had moved in.

.io (British Indian Ocean Territory) became the go-to for developer tools, helped by the fact that “I/O” is something developers already say every day. Then the UK’s 2024 agreement to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius raised questions about what happens to the extension if the territory stops existing in its current form. A country domain, it turns out, comes with the country attached.

.ml (Mali) looked like a perfect match for machine learning. Then years of free registrations through a third-party operator made it a favorite for spammers and scammers, and AI companies kept their distance.

Will .si do for Slovenia what .ai did for Anguilla? Klaudijus doesn’t think so:

“Anguilla is a special case with only about 15,000 people and premium .ai prices – domain sales have become one of its government’s biggest sources of revenue,” he said.

“Slovenia has 2 million people, an economy more than 100 times larger, and .si is run as a national registry at low prices, not as a revenue play. This is a real moment for .si and a good story for Slovenia, but it won’t change the country’s budget.”

For Slovenia, a good outcome is a busier, better-known registry, and maybe a few more people discovering where the extension comes from.

So, should you get a .si domain?

That depends on what you want it for, and on how much faith you have in a brand-new buzzword.

The upside is easy to see. A .si domain costs a fraction of an .ai one, anyone can register it, and short, brandable names are still out there. Just maybe not for long, judging by our numbers.

The catch is that SI is a very new label, and it comes from one government’s choice of words. If the rest of the world keeps saying AI, a name bought purely for its SI meaning could end up meaning a lot less.

Who should get one

• Brands that already own a matching .ai or .com name. Registering the .si version is cheap insurance against someone else getting there first.
• AI and tech startups looking for a short secondary domain. A .si works well as a short, catchy extra address. As the only home for a global product, it’s a bigger gamble.
• Slovenian businesses and anyone targeting Slovenian customers. For them, .si was a good choice before it was cool, and it still is.

Who should probably skip it

• Anyone paying aftermarket prices purely as a bet. Investors set resale prices right now, and value depends on a term that may or may not stick. If a two-letter name costs more than your car, it’s worth sleeping on.
• International businesses planning to use .si as their main domain. Search engines may treat a .si website as Slovenian, which is great if your customers are in Ljubljana and less great if they’re in Lisbon.

The real test arrives with the renewal bill

Renewal invoices have a way of clarifying people’s priorities. When the first .si renewals come due, investors sitting on dozens of short names will have some decisions to make, and plenty of those names will probably expire quietly.

People who built something on their .si domain are far more likely to keep paying. That’s what made .ai stick.

Klaudijus doesn’t see .si taking the spotlight from .ai, but he does expect it to keep growing alongside it.

“The .ai extension remains the established home for AI companies and will keep growing, while .si gives a different kind of buyer a more affordable option,” he said. “Both can grow side by side.”

Until the first renewals arrive, the best sign to watch is whether .si names start turning into real websites. If they do, .si could become a lasting home for AI and tech projects.

If most stay parked, the SI rush will go down as a very busy few weeks for a small European registry, and Slovenia can go back to being famous for Lake Bled.

Short names are going fast, so the best first step is to search for the one you want. Once you find a name that’s free, you can register a .si domain with Hostinger in a few clicks.