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.
The full argument.
Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory in the eastern Caribbean with about 16,000 people. Since February 16, 1995, it has also owned a two-letter slice of the internet: .ai, the country-code domain the government administers under an assignment ICANN made in the mid-1990s to every country and territory in the world. For most of its life, that assignment was trivia. Registrations opened to anyone worldwide on September 15, 2009, and even then the numbers stayed small. As late as 2018, cumulative .ai revenue for the year came to about $2.9 million, a rounding error against the rest of the government's books.
Two things happened to Anguilla that nobody there asked for, nine years apart.
In September 2017, Hurricane Irma hit the island directly. The government's own accounting, presented by then-Minister of Finance Victor Banks in the 2018 budget address, put the damage at over EC$880 million, about US$320 million, against a total island economy that had produced EC$909.76 million of economic activity the entire prior year. The storm cost Anguilla close to a full year's GDP in an afternoon. Tourism, the industry the island leaned on hardest, fell more than 10 percent that year and stayed down.
Then, on November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, and "AI" became the two letters every company wanted next to its name. Anguilla already owned them.
The climb since is a real, dated, and repeatedly under-forecast number. In 2023, .ai registrations reached 354,000, and the government collected EC$87 million, about $32 million, roughly a fifth of total government revenue that year. In 2024, revenue reached about $39 million, close to a quarter of government revenue. That October, Anguilla signed a five-year agreement handing day-to-day registry operations to the American firm Identity Digital, and the migration finished in January 2025. By September 2025, Minister of Infrastructure and Communications José Vanterpool was telling BBC Radio 5 Live that .ai income, which had been under 1 percent of state revenue before the AI boom, would land around 47 percent of the government's total revenue for the year. He called the domain "a gift that was given to us by God."
The actual 2025 number beat even that framing: EC$230,499,740.50, about $85.3 million, more than double 2024's total and far past the government's own draft forecast of EC$132 million made just a year earlier. Growth didn't pause into 2026. The one-millionth .ai domain registered worldwide on January 2, 2026, and Premier Cora Richardson Hodge marked the moment by saying it represented "far more than domain registrations." February 2026 alone brought in EC$32.8 million, a monthly record, the same month a single resale, bot.ai, changed hands for $1.2 million, the highest publicly known price yet paid for one of these domains. By June 2026, total .ai registrations stood at 1,277,727.
None of that money is abstract to the people who live there. In 2024, then-Premier Ellis Webster earmarked part of the windfall for free medical care for senior citizens and for finishing a vocational technology training center at Anguilla's high school, while cautioning that "we can't rely on it solely" and that "you can't predict how long this is going to last." The government has also extended free healthcare to children under five. Vanterpool has described the money going toward school upkeep, scholarships, road work tied directly to school access, an expansion of Clayton J. Lloyd International Airport, and goods-and-services tax relief. None of it reverses what Irma did in 2017. All of it is aimed at making sure the next storm doesn't do the same amount of damage to a government that, for the first time in its history, isn't entirely dependent on tourists showing up.
Anguillan-born chef Dale Carty, who runs Tasty's Restaurant and lived through Irma, put it plainly to a travel writer this year: the storm "devastated the island, but because of our resilience we recovered," and he's hoping the AI-driven money keeps going toward healthcare, education, and training for young people, the same list Webster and Vanterpool have been naming in budget speeches. It's a rare case of a government's stated priorities and a resident's hopes lining up, both backed by a number you can check.
Is any of this guaranteed to last? No, and this outlet is not going to pretend it is. See the AITI tab for the honest case against getting too comfortable with a windfall this new.