On 22 September 2026, President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that artificial intelligence would be called “super intelligence”, or “SI”, in United States government documents. Within a day, Slovenia’s .si country-code extension had become the most watched domain in the industry, and the .ai boom of the last three years suddenly had a challenger made of two letters.
What happened to .si registrations?
The reaction was measured, not just felt. On an ordinary September day, about 100 new .si domains were registered. The day after the speech, there were 3,234, more than thirty times as many. Over the following week, 17,621 new .si domains were registered against 7,209 new .ai domains, and the .si zone grew from 241,846 to 262,319 names in eleven days, an increase of 8.5 percent, according to an analysis of domainnamestat.com data by the Austrian host Domaintechnik, reported by Trending Topics.
The Slovenian registry saw the same wave from the inside. Register.si counted 3,930 new registrations in the 24 hours to 28 September, more than the 3,515 it had recorded in the whole of the previous month, as ABT Domain’s weekly report notes. Security firm Netcraft, which tracked the spike from the first day, found that about half of the .si names registered through one large American registrar were listed for sale within days, with asking prices running to millions of dollars for generic words.
Why are AI companies looking at .si?
The link between .si and artificial intelligence predates the speech. In May 2026, the research lab Recursive Superintelligence raised $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation; it holds recursive.si and forwards it to its main site, recursive.com. Read aloud, .si is “superintelligence” in the same way .ai was “artificial intelligence”: a short, memorable ending that says what a company does. Whether the new term settles into everyday language will decide whether .si stays in demand, but the names are being taken now, not later.
Not every registration is a start-up. Among the .si names registered since 19 September, ABT Domain counted 37 containing “bank”, 119 containing “pay” and 16 containing “gov”. A rush on a cheap, open extension always brings phishing and impersonation with it, which is why brand owners rather than speculators should read these figures closely.
Who can register a .si domain?
Anyone. Slovenia does not restrict its extension to Slovenian people or companies: there is no local presence requirement and no document to supply, and names are registered for one-year terms. At Domgate, a .si domain is registered from €20 a year, the same day. That openness is exactly what made the rush possible, and it also means a competitor or a squatter can take your brand under .si as easily as you can.
What should brand owners do now?
Three steps, in order. Register your brand under .si and its obvious variants before somebody else does: a defensive registration costs a fraction of a recovery procedure. Add .si to the extensions you watch, so that a new registration containing your trademark reaches you the day it appears; Domgate’s trademark watching covers country-code extensions for exactly this reason. And treat .si the way you already treat .ai: as part of the portfolio that protects your name, alongside the trademark registrations that give you the right to reclaim it.
As a corporate ccTLD registrar, Domgate registers and manages country-code domains for brand owners and their advisers in every jurisdiction, including the ones that do impose local presence. For .si, the barrier is not the rules but the speed of everyone else.
