Why So Many Americans Suddenly Bought Slovenian Web Addresses
Slovenia's .si web ending gained almost 13,000 new names in the 24 hours before Oct. 2, 2026, after President Trump signed a Sept. 29 order telling U.S. agencies to say SI and super intelligence instead of AI and artificial intelligence. TechCrunch
The jump was fast. Registry SI spokesperson Klara Herman told the BBC that .si purchases rose 2,199% in September 2026. The registry logged 11,000 new .si addresses on Sept. 30 alone, the day after the order was signed.
.si is Slovenia's country ending for web addresses. Registry SI is the official group that runs it. That Slovenian system became tied to a naming decision in Washington.
The White House lists the order as "Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence," dated Sept. 29, 2026. A companion fact sheet came out the same day titled "President Donald J. Trump Inaugurates The Era of Super Intelligence."
Sales numbers show most buying happened in two days. Hostinger, a company that sells web addresses, said .si is now its second most popular ending after .com. Its customers registered almost 4,300 .si names on Sept. 30 and about 5,400 on Oct. 1. More than three-quarters of all its .si sales since Sept. 23 came in those two days.
Most buyers were in two countries. More than half of Hostinger's .si buyers came from the U.S. and India. Only around 3% of the .si names sold through Hostinger were clearly about AI.
Not every seller saw the same thing. GoDaddy told TechCrunch it does not yet offer the .si ending. Wix told TechCrunch it saw no meaningful rise and called activity since Sept. 29 minimal.
Early counts caught the wave while it grew. The Slovenia Times reported 3,930 new .si names in one 24-hour stretch, compared with 3,515 in the whole prior month. CircleID later put all of September 2026 at 46,066 new registrations. The BBC reported Trump's push to rename AI may be behind an "unprecedented" rise in Slovenia's .si registrations. BBC Netcraft reported on Oct. 1 the order fueled a nearly hundredfold rise in .si registrations. Snopes published a fact-check on Oct. 1 about the claim the order was a ploy to profit from .si names.
The broader context here is simple. Think of country endings like license plates that can also spell something else. People often buy the name first and decide what to do with it later. That helps explain why so few names were directly about AI. Much of this looks like protective buying and quick bets placed where checkout is easiest.
In my view, worth flagging is that the new name does not change the technology itself. How fast systems answer, how they are tested, how the government buys them and keeps them safe all stay the same when a memo swaps two letters. What does change is demand for names. A small European registry is now handling worldwide interest tied to U.S. government wording, which adds strain to its signup systems, disputes over names and resale prices. I saw my own kids in the 2000s claim usernames first and figure out the use second. Buyers are doing the same thing. That habit usually calms down fast. If SI stays in government use, some names will turn into real products and help pages. The rest will quietly expire. Either way, Slovenia's registry is now much better known among U.S. and Indian builders than a week ago, and that attention may last longer than the spike.
