Anguilla is a small Caribbean island with a inhabitants of lower than 20,000. It is also making thousands and thousands off the tech business.
Final week, the BBC reported that Dharmesh Shah, the cofounder and CTO of HubSpot, paid the nation $700,000 earlier this 12 months to purchase the internet deal with you.ai for a brand new firm. So how did a British Abroad Territory that is solely 16 miles lengthy and at its widest, 3.5 miles, change into the king of AI domains? Anguilla gained .ai within the Nineties, when the Web was in its infancy and international locations acquired domains, principally for free of charge, similar to .us for america or .uk for the UK, to launch their web sites.
Then, when ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and the brand new AI age started, firms from Google to Grok began shopping for up the .ai domains. Enterprise Insider stories that there at the moment are greater than 850,000 .ai domains on-line. In 2020, there have been fewer than 50,000.
The AP stories that Anguilla earned round $38 million from promoting domains in 2024, up from $32 million in 2023, virtually 1 / 4 (23%) of its complete income for the 12 months. Tourism remains to be its No. 1 moneymaker at 37%, per the Worldwide Financial Fund.
“Some individuals name it a windfall”, Anguilla’s former premier, Ellis Webster, instructed The New York Occasions final 12 months. “We simply name it God smiling down on us.”
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Anguilla is a small Caribbean island with a inhabitants of lower than 20,000. It is also making thousands and thousands off the tech business.
Final week, the BBC reported that Dharmesh Shah, the cofounder and CTO of HubSpot, paid the nation $700,000 earlier this 12 months to purchase the internet deal with you.ai for a brand new firm. So how did a British Abroad Territory that is solely 16 miles lengthy and at its widest, 3.5 miles, change into the king of AI domains? Anguilla gained .ai within the Nineties, when the Web was in its infancy and international locations acquired domains, principally for free of charge, similar to .us for america or .uk for the UK, to launch their web sites.
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