Slovenia's .si Domain Surges After Trump's Super Intelligence Order

Slovenia's .si domain added almost 13,000 new names in the 24 hours before Oct. 2, 2026, following President Trump's Sept. 29 executive order directing U.S. government agencies to use SI and super intelligence in place of AI and artificial intelligence. TechCrunch

The spike was abrupt. Registry SI spokesperson Klara Herman told the BBC that .si purchases rose 2,199% in September 2026. The registry recorded 11,000 new .si addresses on Sept. 30 alone, the day after the order was signed.

.si is Slovenia's country-code domain. Registry SI is the official organization that manages it. That national infrastructure suddenly became shorthand for a Washington naming decision.

The White House lists the order as "Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence," dated Sept. 29, 2026. A companion fact sheet was published under the title "President Donald J. Trump Inaugurates The Era of Super Intelligence" on the same date.

Registrar data shows the demand concentrated in a very narrow window. Hostinger said .si is now its second most popular domain extension after .com. Among Hostinger customers, almost 4,300 .si domains were registered on Sept. 30 and about 5,400 on Oct. 1. More than three-quarters of all .si domains registered via Hostinger since Sept. 23 came in those last two days.

The buyers were geographically concentrated. More than half of Hostinger's .si buyers came from the U.S. and India. Only around 3% of the .si domains registered via Hostinger were explicitly related to AI.

Distribution across the registrar market was uneven. GoDaddy told TechCrunch it does not yet host the .si domain. Wix told TechCrunch it was not seeing any meaningful uptick in .si registrations and described activity since Sept. 29 as minimal.

Earlier counts captured the surge while it was still building. The Slovenia Times reported 3,930 new .si domains registered in a 24-hour period following the push, compared with 3,515 .si domains registered during the entire previous month. CircleID later put September 2026 as a whole at 46,066 new registrations. The BBC reported that Trump's push to rename AI may be behind an "unprecedented" rise in registrations for Slovenia's .si domains. BBC Netcraft reported on Oct. 1 that the order fueled a nearly hundredfold increase in .si registrations. Snopes published a fact-check on Oct. 1 on the claim that the order was a ploy to profit off .si domains.

The broader context here is familiar to anyone who manages DNS portfolios. Country-code domains regularly acquire second lives as semantic abbreviations. Registrants move first and clarify use cases later, which helps explain why AI-related strings account for such a small share so far. Much of this looks like defensive registration and short-term speculation routed through registrars where checkout friction is lowest.

In this author's view, worth flagging is how little the naming change itself alters the underlying systems. Inference latency, model evaluation, procurement rules and security controls do not shift because a memo substitutes two letters. What does shift is namespace pressure. A small European registry is now absorbing global demand tied to U.S. federal vocabulary, with attendant load on registration systems, dispute processes and aftermarket pricing. I watched my own children adopt new platforms in the 2000s by grabbing handles first and deciding what they were for second. Domain buyers are behaving much the same way.

That behavior tends to normalize quickly. If SI persists in federal usage, some of these names will become real products and documentation sites. The rest will expire quietly. Either way, the episode leaves Slovenia's registry with far greater visibility among U.S. and Indian developers than it had a week earlier, and that visibility itself may prove more durable than any single registration spike.