Slovenia's .si Domains Spiked 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 increase was fast. 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, the two-letter ending assigned to the country in the domain name system. Registry SI is the official organization that manages it. That national infrastructure became linked 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 was published under the title "President Donald J. Trump Inaugurates The Era of Super Intelligence" on the same date.

Registrar data, sales figures from companies that sell domains to the public, shows 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 sellers 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 will be familiar to anyone who follows domain portfolios. Country-code domains often get a second life as shorthand, when the two letters also mean something else. Buyers tend to register first and decide on a use later, which helps explain why AI-related names account for such a small share so far. Much of this looks like defensive registration and short-term speculation placed through sellers where checkout is simplest.

In my view, worth flagging is how little the name change itself alters the underlying technology. Inference latency, the delay in getting an answer from a model, plus model evaluation, procurement rules and security controls do not change because a memo swaps two letters. What does change is pressure on names. A small European registry is now handling global demand tied to U.S. federal wording, with added load on registration systems, dispute processes and resale prices. I watched my own children in the 2000s grab usernames first and figure out the purpose second. Domain buyers are acting much the same way. That pattern usually settles fast. If SI stays in federal use, some names will become real products and documentation sites. The rest will expire quietly. Either way, Slovenia's registry now has far greater visibility among U.S. and Indian developers than it had a week earlier, and that visibility may last longer than any single spike.