Slovenia's country-code internet domain has passed 200,000 registered names for the first time, after a surge in demand traceable to a change in American vocabulary.
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September, President Donald Trump said his administration would stop calling the technology artificial intelligence and start calling it super intelligence, on the grounds that the word artificial made intelligence sound fake. The abbreviation he proposed, SI, is also Slovenia's two-letter country code, and therefore its top-level domain.
Registrations followed within hours. More than 2,000 new .si domains were taken on the day of the speech and more than 4,000 the day after: upwards of 6,000 in two days, against a normal run rate of roughly 1,000 a month. By the Tuesday morning about 219,800 .si domains were registered, some 4,000 of them in the preceding 24 hours. September closed with more than 10,000 new registrations.
The registry is Register.si, a department of Arnes, the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia, a public institute which also runs the top-level name servers for the domain. A registration costs 10 euros. Commercial registrars moved quickly: Hostinger began offering .si names on 23 September at $11.99 for the first year and $16.99 a year thereafter.
Arnes has been careful about the cause. "We would, however, be careful about attributing the entire increase to President Trump's comments," said Klara Herman, a spokesperson for the agency, who noted that .si registrations had been trending upwards before the speech, while accepting that what followed was an exceptional additional surge.
The registry has been equally careful about the proceeds, saying that speculation in the media about millions of euros of earnings for Slovenia has no factual basis. At 10 euros a name, the arithmetic is not generous: the entire two-day rush is worth around 60,000 euros in registration fees.
The .si zone has been open to anyone since 2008. As recently as June there were about 186,000 names under it, a total that had taken eighteen years of general availability to assemble.
What the market has bought, then, is not a technology. It is a pair of letters that an administration has decided to use.
The Questionable Times considers this the clearest price signal of the artificial intelligence era, or, as it must now be recorded, the super intelligence era. Slovenia did not build anything, announce anything or invest in anything. It was already in possession of the abbreviation, and the abbreviation was revalued by a speech in New York.
That makes the .si zone the only asset in the sector with a genuinely fixed supply. Chips can be fabricated, data centres can be built and models can be trained, but there will never be more than one two-letter country code for Slovenia, and it is already fully allocated to Slovenia.
Our analysts note the implication for sovereign wealth generally. A country's exposure to any given technology is now set by whichever two letters the technology is eventually abbreviated to, which makes every national domain a long-dated option on foreign terminology. Slovenia's has been exercised. The others are still open.
Register.si's insistence that it is not earning millions is, on the published figures, correct, and is also the only disclosure the market has received. At 10 euros a registration, Slovenia's entire position in super intelligence is worth roughly what it costs to cater a mid-sized conference.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has one question outstanding. If the value of .si rose because an American administration began using the letters, it would like to know what becomes of the 219,800 registered names on the day it stops.