A surprising ripple effect from former U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to rebrand artificial intelligence (AI) as “super intelligence,” abbreviated SI, has rocked Slovenia’s national domain name market, pushing monthly .si suffix registrations to unprecedented levels, according to the country’s official domain registry Register.si.
Trump first floated the renaming idea during his September 11 address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Arguing that the term “artificial” creates a misleading impression that the technology is fake, he told attendees: “It’s not fake, it’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful… welcome to the new world of super intelligence.”
Weeks later, the policy moved forward: on a Tuesday in late September, Trump gathered leading U.S. technology industry executives for what he billed as “an extraordinary gathering” of pioneers “building America’s Golden Age.” During the event, he signed an executive order mandating all U.S. federal government departments and agencies adopt “SI” and “Super Intelligence” as the official terminology for the technology, requiring the replacement of “AI” across all official government correspondence, public websites, formal reports and all other official communications.
The spelling error on the final order quickly drew public mockery online, after observers noticed the word “United States” was misspelled directly beneath Trump’s signature on the document.
But beyond the domestic political controversy in the U.S., the proposal triggered an unexpected boom half a world away in Slovenia, where the .si country-code top-level domain has long served as the official online identifier for Slovenian websites, matching the new SI abbreviation Trump proposed.
Register.si spokesperson Klara Herman confirmed that total .si domain registrations hit 44,000 in September, a staggering jump from fewer than 2,000 registrations recorded in August. That marks an increase of more than 2,100% month-over-month, with activity spiking particularly in the final weeks of the month. Herman described the scale of September’s registration activity as “unprecedented” when compared to the previous 12 months of data, noting that September’s numbers stand out “very clearly” against all other months of 2026.
The peak of the surge came on September 30 alone, when the registry processed more than 11,000 new .si domain applications. While Herman acknowledged that Trump’s renaming push is the most plausible trigger for the boom, she cautioned that it would be premature to attribute the entire increase solely to the U.S. president’s comments.
Domain industry observers note a more established explanation for the rush: speculative domain purchasing, a practice where investors register specific domain names they expect to grow in value, with the goal of reselling them later for a substantial profit. One of the most famous examples of this practice dates back to 1997, when prominent domain investor Rick Schwartz, widely known as “The Domain King,” purchased the domain men.com for $15,000. Seven years later, he sold the asset for $1.32 million, netting a seven-figure windfall.
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