Not everyone is fearing the rise of AI – this tiny Caribbean island struck gold in an unexpected way.

ChatGPT's launch in 2022 ago brought about the dawn of the AI age and, curiously, a massive boost to Anguilla’s economy. The chatbot’s public debut resulted in a kind of digital gold rush as companies and big businesses scrambled to acquire websites that end in .ai.

However, it turns out the small British territory, which is best known for being an luxury holiday destination, was given control of the .ai internet address in the 1990s. This occurred as hundreds of less common top-level domains were assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names.

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Typically, domains are meant to indicate a website has a link to a particular region or language (such as .uk for the UK) – but it’s not always a requirement. There are currently over 600,000 .ai web domains, over ten times the amount that existed in 2018, as reported by The Independent.

Examples of companies using the domain name include Google, which uses it for Google.ai, and Elon Musk’s x.ai as the homepage for his Grok AI chatbot. Start-ups like the AI search engine Perplexity have also scrambled to take up address.

Now, Anguilla is reaping the benefits. The country’s earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled in 2023 to $32 million (about £23.6 million) and now accounts for about 20% of Anguilla's total government revenue. Before interest in AI surged, it hovered at around just 5%.

But why exactly has this happened? Every time a .ai web address gets renewed, Anguilla’s government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee. Ram Mohan, Identity Digital Chief Strategy Officer said the fee, which stands at $140 for two years, won’t change.

In addition, the nation is also paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have even managed to earn tens of thousands of dollars from this enterprise.

The money has a direct impact on Anguilla’s economy. Encompassing just 35 square miles, the tiny island has a population of about 16,000.

And while the island’s white beaches and blue waves attract wealthy tourists, many residents are economically underprivileged – particularly with tourism’s decline during the pandemic and the devastation left by 2017’s Hurricane Irma.

Premier Ellis Webster revealed that it was pure luck that it was Anguilla that was assigned the .ai domain in 1995 and not nearby Antigua, given that both places had those letters in their names.