This tiny island is cashing out with each new .ai website registration
How Anguilla is making millions from the AI boom without building any datacenters
Anguilla is an island in the Caribbean with an area of only 35 square miles. It has historically been a tourism-driven economy but that has been changing over recent years because it owns the top-level country code .ai (their equivalent of .us) and is in the right place and right time with the rapid boost in AI startups. Every time new .ai domains are registered, purchased, or renewed, that money flows back to the island. This week’s newsletter dives into the history of Anguilla, how much they are making, and what they’re doing with the newfound wealth. And don’t worry power industry folks, we will briefly discuss where they get their power from. I’ve always been fascinated by how these remote islands keep the lights on.
A quick history of Anguilla
People have been living on Anguilla for at least 3,000 years, as evidenced by petroglyphs and other artifacts found on the island. These indigenous people are believed to be settlers from the South American continent (Wikipedia).
Europeans spotted the island in the mid 1500’s and started building in 1631 when the Dutch West India Company built a fort. It was destroyed by the Spanish just two years later. English settlers arrived about 20 years later and the island remained an English territory except for one brief period in 1666 when France took control. The island was promptly returned back to the British with the Treaty of Breda, and remains a British territory to this day, despite multiple attempts by the French in the 17th and 18th centuries to forcibly regain control.
As was the case in most British territories in the Caribbean, agriculture was the primary export, and slaves from Central and West Africa were forced to work on tobacco and cotton plantations. Once slavery was outlawed in the early 1800’s most plantation owners left the island.
The British tried to give St Kitts & Nevis control of the island, but Anguillans were starkly opposed to that, and it eventually boiled over to a revolution in 1967 where St Kitts police forces were kicked out and Anguilla returned to being a British colony.
When did they get electricity?
The island remained mostly undeveloped until the 1975, when the first island-wide electrical grid buildout began. Prior to that, only a few small electrical networks existed. The Anguilla Electricity Company Limited was incorporated in 1991 as a government-owned utility and is the exclusive supplier of electricity to the island. Their peak load is about 15MW and, like most small islands, most of that power comes from diesel and propane, aside a 1MW solar installation that went live about 10 years ago (ANGLEC).
How much do they make from each new .ai website?
It typically costs about $70/year for a standard .ai registration, and Anguilla keeps 90% of that revenue. It doesn’t seem like much, but if you multiply it by all of the .ai domains that have been purchased over the last few years, it adds up quickly. I personally have registered four different .ai domains while playing around with different ideas, and many other people have been doing the same thing while they think about entering the AI game.
They also occasionally make even more $ by auctioning off valuable domain names. If someone stops paying their registration fees on a domain and their registration expires, that domain ends up back with Anguilla, who can then auction it off to the highest bidder. They just started these auctions in April, 2025 and brought in over $600k in revenue just in the first month (DomainIncite).
In 2024, they made $39m from their newfound domain registration business, more than 20% of the total income of the island, and that number is projected to keep growing over the coming years (BBC). The newfound revenue is a welcome sight to the island’s government, providing some economic stability to it’s tourism-dependent economy. This windfall is helping them to build out critical infrastructure projects and improve healthcare and education.