Guess which little Caribbean island turned the AI ​​boom into a digital gold mine

Chatbot creators, IT specialists and… have benefited from the artificial intelligence boom Nvidia investors. It also provides an incredible windfall for Anguilla, a small island in the Caribbean.

ChatGPT debut almost two years ago, it heralded the arrival of the age of artificial intelligence and sparked a digital gold rush as firms tried to stake their very own claim by acquiring web sites ending in .ai.

And that is where Anguilla involves the rescue. In the Nineties, the UK gained control of the .ai web address. It was one in all a whole bunch of obscure top-level domains assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names. While domains are intended to point that a website links to a specific region or language, this isn’t at all times required.

Google uses google.ai to showcase its AI services, while Elon Musk uses x.ai as the homepage of his Grok AI chatbot. Startups like AI search engine Perplexity have also hijacked .ai web addresses, redirecting users from the .com version.

Anguilla’s earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled last 12 months $32 milliondriven by growing interest in artificial intelligence. The revenue currently accounts for roughly 20% of Anguilla’s total government revenue. Before the artificial intelligence boom, it fluctuated around 5%.

The government of Anguilla, which uses the gov.ai homepage, charges a fee for every renewal of a .ai web address, Ram Mohan, chief strategy officer of Identity Digital, said the fee – $140 for 2 years – is not going to change. It also makes money when latest addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites do tens of hundreds were collected dollars.

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The money directly fuels the economy of Anguilla, which covers just 35 square miles (91 square kilometers) and has a population of about 16,000. Blessed with coral reefs, clear waters and palm-fringed white-sand beaches, the island is a paradise for ultra-wealthy tourists. Still, many residents are disadvantaged and tourism has been hit hard by the pandemic, where it was previously strong hurricane.

Anguilla doesn’t have its own artificial intelligence industry, although Prime Minister Ellis Webster hopes to sooner or later turn out to be a center for the technology. He said it was pure coincidence that the .ai domain was assigned to Anguilla fairly than nearby Antigua in 1995 because each places had these letters of their names.

Webster said the money relieves pressure on government funds and helps fund key projects, but cautioned that “we can’t rely on it alone.”

“It’s impossible to predict how long this will last,” Webster told the AP. “That’s why I don’t want our economy, our country and all our programs to be based only on this. “And then all of a sudden, within the next year or two, a new fad comes along and we are forced to make significant spending cuts, eliminating programs.”

To help keep pace with the surge in domain registrations, Anguilla said Tuesday it’s signing a contract with U.S. domain management company Identity Digital to assist manage the effort. They said the deal would mean more revenue for the government while improving the resilience and security of web addresses.

Identity Digital, which also manages the Australian .au domain, expects to migrate all .ai domain services to its systems early next 12 months, Mohan said in an interview.

An area software entrepreneur had helped Anguilla arrange a registry system a long time earlier.

There are actually over 533,000 .ai web domains, a greater than 10-fold increase since 2018. The International Monetary Fund said in a report Maybe report it that the profits will help diversify the economy, “making it more proof against external shocks.

Webster expects domain revenue to proceed to grow, and it could even double this 12 months from last 12 months’s $32 million.

He said the money would fund airport expansion, free medical take care of seniors and the completion of a vocational technology training center at a highschool in Anguilla.

The revenue also provides “budget support” for other projects the government is , reminiscent of a national development fund that it could quickly tap into for hurricane recovery. Webster said the island normally gets help from its administrative authority, Britain, which comes with certain conditions.

Mohan said that working with Identity Digital can even enable protection against cybercriminals attempting to capitalize on the hype surrounding artificial intelligence.

He gave the example of Tokelau, an island in the Pacific Ocean whose .tk addresses became notoriously related to spam and phishing after outsourcing registration services.

“We’re concerned that bad actors will take something, add an .ai file to it, and then make it sound like they’re much bigger or better than they actually are,” Mohan said, adding that the company’s technology will quickly weed out suspicious web sites .

Another profit is that .AI web sites will now not have to connect with the government’s digital infrastructure via a single web cable to the island, which puts them liable to digital bottlenecks or physical disruptions.

Now they are going to use the company’s servers scattered around the world, which means access to them will likely be faster because they will likely be closer to users.

“It takes milliseconds to microseconds,” Mohan said.