A Hurricane Erased Anguilla's Economy. Two Letters Are Rebuilding It.
Anguilla, population 16,000, now gets close to half its government revenue from leasing out the two letters after its own name. It's paying for hospitals, school upkeep, and an airport.
Explain Like I'm 5 — the whole thing in plain language.
Anguilla is a tiny Caribbean island, about 16,000 people. Every country gets its own two-letter website ending, like .uk or .jp. Anguilla's is .ai.
For decades that was just trivia. Then a hurricane called Irma hit the island in 2017 and wiped out about a year's worth of its entire economy in one storm. A few years later, a company called OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT, and suddenly every tech company on earth wanted "AI" in its web address. Anguilla already owned those two letters, and it charges anyone in the world $140 to $200 to register a .ai website for two years.
The money kept climbing every single year, faster than the island's own government expected. In 2023 it was about $32 million. In 2024, about $39 million. In 2025, it hit $85.3 million, nearly half of everything the government collected that year. In January 2026, the one millionth .ai website was registered.
The government is spending that money on things people can point to: free healthcare that now covers children under five and senior citizens, a training center at the island's only high school, road repairs near schools, and an airport upgrade. A local chef who lived through the hurricane says he hopes it keeps funding healthcare and education for the island's kids.
It's a genuinely unusual story: a tiny island that lost a year of its economy to a storm, then got handed an unexpected fortune because it happened to own two letters everybody suddenly wanted.