The .si Domain Rush: Super Intelligence or Just Another Bubble?

Everyone is rushing to buy Slovenian .si domains right now. They call them SI domains because Donald Trump decided AI should be renamed Super Intelligence.

From UN Speech to Executive Order

On September 22, 2026, Trump told the UN General Assembly that the word “artificial” makes the tech sound fake. He said from now on US documents would use “super intelligence” or SI. On September 29 he signed an executive order making federal agencies drop “AI” and switch to SI. The same day a bunch of big tech CEOs showed up at the White House and signed a voluntary White House Accord on Super Intelligence. The names on that paper included Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Greg Brockman.

That was enough. People started grabbing .si names like they were lottery tickets. Build.si is already listed for sale at 10 million dollars. Other ones like seed.si sit at 8 million. Registration of a normal .si domain costs about 10 euros. The gap is the whole point.

The ai.com Playbook: $70 Million for Noise

Same movie played out with ai.com. Kris Marszalek, the Crypto.com guy, paid 70 million dollars for it in April 2025. Biggest public domain sale on record. He launched it with a Super Bowl ad in February 2026. A lot of sign-ups, a lot of noise, but no clear reported operating revenue that anyone can point to. The platform is still more waitlist and agent talk than a money machine. Roughly a year and a half of ownership and the domain itself has not turned into a cash printer.

That is the bubble right there. The domain is just a Slovenian country-code address. It has no magic. Some rich guys signed a paper saying they will call the tech SI from now on. The industry has poured huge amounts of money into the models. The actual revenue numbers from the pure AI companies are climbing into the tens of billions for the leaders, but they are still nowhere near the spend. Buying a hyped domain does not fix that.

The domain is just a Slovenian country-code address. It has no magic. Buying a hyped domain does not fix that.

Real Products Don't Need Country Codes

Look at Apple. Highest-value tech company on the planet. They still partner with Google for the Gemini models that power the new Siri and Apple Intelligence features. They already had OpenAI's ChatGPT plugged into the system earlier. They do not need to own an SI domain to ship product.

A logistics firm in Kazakhstan, a health tracker in Denmark, a sweater brand in Australia or a finance outfit in Bangladesh does not need an SI domain either. If they get FOMO and start writing big checks for one, they just lose money. Open-weight models are already giving the big closed shops real competition. The few established companies whose whole business is AI might get some branding edge if they manage to buy a clean SI name from a squatter. More likely we will see more cases like ai.com: big purchase, long wait, email list of waitlisted users, and not much else.

The Timing and the Precedent

The part that stands out is the timing. Registrations of .si domains jumped hard after Trump's posts and the UN speech. Some people registered thousands of them in the months before the public announcement. There is talk that people close to the family or connected firms were in early. No solid public proof has tied Donald Trump Jr's companies or any specific Trump-backed firm to those purchases. Still, the pattern looks familiar.

Trump has done this before with Dell. In February 2026 his investment accounts bought between 1 and 5 million dollars of Dell stock. Nine days later he told a crowd to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” He repeated the praise later. Then the Pentagon handed Dell a 9.7 billion dollar contract. The shares moved hard. That is the record.

A domain name does not create revenue. A rebrand does not create revenue. The companies that already make money from real products will keep making money. The rest will keep buying names and waiting for the next wave of sign-ups.

Will .si domains become a lasting branding standard, or another waitlist-heavy footnote?