Slovenia’s .si Domain Registrations Surge Amid Trump’s AI Rebrand

Donald Trump’s push to replace “AI” with “super intelligence” has coincided with a more concrete change: a rush for Slovenian web addresses ending in .si. Register.si spokeswoman Klara Herman told the BBC that 44,000 addresses were registered in September 2026. She called the activity unprecedented, while cautioning against attributing the whole increase to the president’s comments.

A surge with two different counts

Herman put August registrations at fewer than 2,000 and said 11,000 new addresses were registered on September 30 alone. Her description of late September as “unprecedented” compared the activity with the previous 12 months—not just a single quiet day.

TechRadar’s October 3 account cited different Register.si figures: 46,066 September registrations against 3,515 in August, or about 13.1 times as many. Its headline’s “over a 100X” figure compares one exceptionally busy day with an average August day. It is not a hundredfold increase in monthly registrations. The two accounts leave the exact monthly totals unresolved.

Buying an address, betting on a label

The connection is the suffix: .si is Slovenia’s country-code ending for web addresses, and it matches Trump’s preferred abbreviation. Domains are the readable addresses people type into browsers. The BBC identified speculative buying as one possible explanation: purchasers reserve names hoping demand will rise and they can sell them later for a profit.

That is an investment strategy, not automatically an abuse. The BBC corrected its article to distinguish ordinary domain investing from cybersquatting—registering names in bad faith with the intent to profit. The distinction matters when describing this rush: hoping a web address becomes valuable does not, by itself, make its purchase improper.

The registry’s return is more straightforward. TechRadar says Register.si charges registrars €10 per domain. That fee is separate from any price an investor might later secure for a desirable name. The registry has also rejected media speculation about millions in earnings for Slovenia as having “no real basis.”

A federal instruction, not an industry rename

Trump’s stated objection was that “artificial” makes the technology sound fake. His executive order instructs US departments and agencies to use “SI” and “Super Intelligence” instead of AI in official correspondence, websites, reports and other communications.

The directive covers executive-branch documents outside statute, rather than imposing a new name across the AI industry. For anyone buying domains in anticipation of wider adoption, that leaves a gap between a government instruction and a market bet. The order tells agencies which words to use; it does not determine whether businesses or the rest of the world will follow.