MARKET INTELLIGENCE

.si Domains: Super Intelligence Opportunity or Speculative Bubble?

Confirmed .si domain sales, registration growth, and the evidence behind the current super-intelligence wave.

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A two-letter country code from Slovenia registered 3,515 .si domains in all of August. In September it registered 46,066. The reason sits in the White House.

This is the story of the .si wave: what triggered it, what the numbers actually say, where real sales happened, and where the story runs ahead of the evidence. If you are a domain investor watching this space, this is the honest version — confirmed sales separated from asking prices, registrations separated from adoption, and the mistakes already being made.

What triggered the .si wave

The catalyst is political, not technical. In September 2026, the U.S. president launched a campaign to replace the term "Artificial Intelligence" with "Super Intelligence" — abbreviated "SI," which happens to be Slovenia's country code.

Three escalating events:

September 19 — the Truth Social poll. President Trump posted a poll asking followers to pick a replacement for "artificial intelligence": "Superior Intelligence (SI), Extreme Intelligence (EI), and Supreme Intelligence (SI)." He called "artificial intelligence" "inaccurate, and very ineloquent." Around 30,000 votes landed within roughly an hour; "Superior Intelligence" led with 42% (NDTV Profit, September 20).

September 22 — the UN General Assembly speech. Trump told the Assembly the U.S. would begin using "the much more accurate term 'super intelligence, SI'" in official documents. "The word 'artificial intelligence' makes it sound fake," he said. Domain investors did the math within hours: the initials "SI" were entering executive-branch vocabulary and they are a two-letter domain extension.

September 29 — the Executive Order. "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence" directs the executive branch to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in specified official communications and non-statutory documents. The order's language is absolute: the executive branch "will not acknowledge the usage of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable setting" (The Register, September 30).

One important nuance: this wave has a pre-wave. "Superintelligence" was already an industry term — OpenAI's Superalignment project, Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, and a $650M funding round for Richard Socher's startup Recursive. In May 2026, Recursive.si sold for $20,000 to that same startup, triggering an earlier, smaller investor run-up that Domain Name Wire covered on June 11. Trump provided the mass-market accelerant, not the origin.

The registration surge

The registry's public counter (register.si, operated by ARNES) is the primary source — Slovenia's ccTLD publishes no zone file, so these are the registry's own published figures:

Date Total .si New in period Source
Aug 2026 (full month) — 3,515 register.si via Domain Name Wire
Sep 4, 2026 ~190,000 — register.si archive via DNW
Sep 23, 2026 198,535 4,794 in 24h Netcraft
Sep 28, 2026 ~219,000 4,311 in 24h Domain Name Wire
Sep 30, 2026 ~219,800 ~11,000 in 24h ARNES via BBC/Euronews
Sep 2026 (full month) — 46,066 register.si via DNW (Oct 1)
Oct 1, 2026 252,944 13,603 in 24h Netcraft
Oct 2, 2026 ~254,000+ 12,801 in 24h pasqualepillitteri.it / Boundikas

September's 46,066 registrations represent about 19% of all .si domains in existence — roughly thirteen times August's volume. Registry SI spokeswoman Klara Herman called it a 2,199% increase (BBC, September 30). Netcraft measured that new .si registrations overtook .ai within 25 hours of the UN speech.

Context matters. The economics that make .si a speculator's dream: $11–12 per year retail versus .ai's ~$85–90 per year with a two-year minimum (~$171–180). As NotRenewing's operator Sully put it: "Nobody ever talks themselves into two hundred bad names at $85 apiece. At twelve bucks you don't even slow down enough to ask the question."

Hostinger told TechCrunch (October 2) that .si is now its second most popular TLD after .com — 4,300 registrations on September 30, 5,400 on October 1, with more than half of buyers from the U.S. and India. Note the distribution is concentrated, not universal: GoDaddy doesn't offer .si, and Wix saw "no meaningful uptick."

Confirmed .si domain sales vs. asking prices

For a careful comparison framework, see comparable domain sales.

This is where the story separates from the noise. The aftermarket is active but thin, and asking prices run orders of magnitude above transacted prices.

Confirmed sales (reported via NameBio/DNForum/Sedo):

Post-wave (Sept 22 – Oct 2):

Domain Price Venue Date
otherwise.si $18,888 Spaceship Sep 24
cosmic.si $7,995 Sedo Oct 1
models.si $5,458 Sedo Sep 24
stack.si $3,988 Sedo Sep 24
minds.si $2,600 Atom Sep 24

Pre-wave 2026:

Domain Price Note
AI.si $34,000 Highest reported .si sale
Bot.si $20,000
Recursive.si $20,000 End user — Recursive (Socher's superintelligence co.)
Build.si $17,435
Military.si $1,795 End user — Militaria.pl

Asking prices (listings — NOT sales):

The bottom line: the largest confirmed post-wave sale is $18,888. Every "millions" figure in circulation is an asking price.

Investor-to-investor activity vs. real end-user adoption

For the distinction between liquidity contexts, see wholesale vs. end-user value.

The evidence here is blunt. Multiple independent trackers agree the wave is overwhelmingly wholesale — investors trading with investors:

Real end-user demand exists but is minimal and mostly pre-wave:

  1. Recursive — recursive.si — Richard Socher's superintelligence startup (~$650M raised in 2026 from GV, NVIDIA, AMD, Greycroft). Bought for $20,000 in May 2026; 301-redirects to recursive.com. The single best end-user proof point — and it's pre-wave.
  2. Marqo — marqo.si — Marqo.ai of San Francisco ("Commerce Superintelligence," ~$18M raised). Live use claimed alongside marqo.ai.
  3. Militaria.pl — military.si — $1,795 (June 2026). A Polish military supply store: European local use, not the SI thesis.

Net assessment: 33 of 35 reported H1 2026 .si sales were investor-to-investor (Domain Name Wire), with end-user adoption limited to a handful of known cases. This is the classic early-TLD-hype profile — registrations first, aftermarket second, end users maybe years later, if the terminology sticks beyond executive-branch communications. Domain Name Wire's caution stands: "Continued growth will depend a lot on whether anyone other than the U.S. government starts referring to AI as SI."

What makes a strong .si domain

For a broader naming framework, see what makes a domain valuable.

The confirmed sales and serious investor discussion point to a clear pattern:

Dynadot's own analysis frames the credible-investment segment as "short, brandable names ending in 'si.'" The strong pattern is a non-intelligence word + .si (Build.si, Bot.si, Stack.si) — the extension does the talking.

What makes a weak .si domain

The FOMO registrations are documented and follow predictable patterns:

The semantic trap

If SI means "Super Intelligence," then some keyword + .si combinations become redundant — the keyword repeats what the extension already says:

All of these are real registrations or listings. It's the same logic that makes the strong names strong: with a meaning-loaded extension, the word before the dot should do something different, not repeat the extension. Build.si works precisely because "build" doesn't mean "intelligence."

Two structural handicaps investors should know: Google's Search Central documentation lists .ai, .io and .co among the ccTLDs it treats as generic — .si is not on the list, so Google geotargets it to Slovenia, a ranking handicap for the exact US startups investors hope will buy (Google Search Central, "Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites"). And there's a tonal problem in China: while ài (love) helped .ai, sǐ (death) doesn't do .si any favors (Ray Hackney via NamePros).

Practical takeaways for domain investors

For a pre-purchase framework, see evaluating a domain before buying.

For the direct buy decision, see whether you should buy a .si domain.

  1. Separate the three numbers. Registrations (booming), confirmed sales (five post-wave, largest $18,888), and asking prices (fantasy). They are three different markets. Buy based on the middle one.
  2. The $12 registration fee is the trap. Cheap regs manufacture the illusion of a liquid market. Quality filters that work at $85 a name disappear at $12.
  3. Demand is three buyers deep. Treat reseller-market depth as near-zero. If you're buying to flip to another investor, you're buying the last chair in musical chairs.
  4. End-user evidence is the gate. Watch ProductHunt TLD data, not registration counters. Until non-government companies start saying "SI" and building on .si, this is speculation on terminology, not on adoption.
  5. Buy the extension's opposite, not its echo. Short, non-intelligence words and true phonetic hacks are the pattern that holds. Redundant "intelligence + .si" names are the pattern that embarrasses.
  6. Renewal numbers will be the verdict. As Sully put it: "I'll be watching next year's renewal numbers." September 2027 tells you whether this was a market or a moment.

Sources

Research base: .si Domain Wave Report (research date October 3, 2026), with all six QA accuracy revisions preserved.