The tiny Carribbean island of Anguilla, population 15,753 has seen an absolute boom as it becomes a hub of artificial intelligence… sort of. The AP reports that the British territory isn’t so much a new Silicon Valley in the AI age (though its capital’s name is literally “The Valley”), the local government is pulling in at least $32 million a year without lifting a finger simply because the royalties paid by domain registrars to sell .ai web addresses. Through the luck of happenstance of beating out countries like Algeria, Albania that conceivably could have claimed .ai when ICANN assigned it in 1995, the equivalent of 10 percent of Anguilla’s gross domestic product is paid to its government from startups in the AI space registering URLs in the territory’s top-level domain.
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