Following a presidential address at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2026, Slovenia’s national internet registry logged 46,066 new .si web addresses. The surge coincided with Donald Trump’s push to replace the term artificial intelligence with super intelligence
or SI.
A presidential vocabulary shift in Washington has triggered an extraordinary wave of internet registrations in the small European nation where Melania Trump was born. US President Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that the United States would now call artificial intelligence super intelligence,
or SI, because the word artificial makes the technology sound fake. Because .si serves as the official country code top-level domain for Slovenia, the White House announcement inadvertently sparked a global scramble for matching website addresses. The coincidence ironically exists only because Slovenia was assigned SI when SL had already gone to Sierra Leone.
Donald Trump’s push to rebrand artificial intelligence as super intelligence was also telegraphed by Truth Social polls from September 19, and Netcraft found speculative .si buying. That sparked a betting spree: a Polymarket contract on whether Trump would rename AI by September 30 opened on September 20 and drew $151,000 in bets by September 23.
Register.si Records Unprecedented September Traffic
The national internet registry managing the country’s domain extensions absorbed a massive wave of demand throughout the month. Register.si logged 46,066 new .si domains in September 2026, compared with just 3,515 in August, according to figures cited by TechRadar. Register.si spokeswoman Klara Herman reported to the BBC that 44,000 addresses were registered in September 2026, calling the activity unprecedented while noting that August registrations sat below 2,000.
Activity accelerated dramatically late in the month. Registry representatives recorded 11,000 new web addresses registered in a single day on September 30, with registrations continuing to accelerate to over 12,600+ a day at the time of writing, as an increasing number of registrants lock in key domain names with the registrar.
Truth Social Polls and Executive Orders Drive Market Bets
The sudden rush caught few attentive observers completely off guard, as the administration had telegraphed the nomenclature shift days earlier. On September 19, Trump posted a poll on Truth Social offering choices, and Netcraft observed speculative .si buying taking place even before the formal speech aired in New York.
President Trump formalized the terminology change by signing an executive order instructing US departments and agencies to use SI
and Super Intelligence
in official correspondence, reports, and digital platforms. The order tells agencies which words to use; it does not determine whether businesses or the rest of the world will follow. It has no say in whether the nomenclature actually catches up with or replaces AI in an industry that has far more pressing concerns to address than its own name.
Financial Speculation Versus Registry Revenue
Analysts point to speculative buying of potentially high-value domain names should the trend catch on, to flip for a high multiple (100x, 1000x, or even higher in certain cases) on transfer as a considerable play. The BBC corrected its article to distinguish ordinary domain investing from cybersquatting—registering names in bad faith with the intent to profit. This mirrors how Anguilla’s .ai extension became heavily sought-after by artificial intelligence firms or Tuvalu’s .tv suffix was adopted by streaming platforms, with Anguilla earning around $32 million from .ai in 2023, more than 20% of government revenue, according to IMF figures cited by Foreign Policy.
The registry itself operates on a fixed fee structure. Register.si charges every registrar the same €10 per domain. While current totals represent 46,066 registrations, the registry has said media speculation about millions in earnings for Slovenia has no real basis, with the obvious beneficiary for now seeming to be the state of Slovenia, though at a limited scale.
Klara Herman told the BBC and TechRadar that 44,000 web addresses with the .si suffix had been registered in September, compared to less than 2,000 in August – an increase of more than 2,100%.
Active domain counts in Slovenia have climbed past 220,000, representing over 10% of the nation’s total population. As registrations continue, the registry has actively advised trademark holders and corporations to lock down their matching .si web identifiers as soon as possible.
The monthly numbers might be even more impressive if one considers the statement of the Register.si spokeswoman, Klara Herman, to the BBC. Her description of late September as unprecedented compared the activity with the previous 12 months rather than just a single quiet day.