.si after 'Super Intelligence': did one UN speech move a ccTLD?

On 22 September 2026 Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that US government documents will now call artificial intelligence "super intelligence", or SI. Within hours the replies were about domains. .si is Slovenia's country-code TLD, open to anyone, and costs a fraction of .ai. Did one speech really move a ccTLD, and is anything worth registering now? Here is what the registry's numbers and 87 WHOIS lookups of my own show, with a re-check on 4 October.

Yes, the speech moved .si, and it has not stopped

Domain Name Wire, reading Register.si's public counters, put the zone at about 190,000 names on 4 September and about 219,000 on 28 September: more than 15% growth in a month. On 4 October the Register.si homepage showed 275,938. That is roughly 45% above the early-September figure, and the curve is getting steeper, not flatter.

Registered .si domains, September to October 2026

	.si domains
4 Sep	190,000
28 Sep	219,000
4 Oct	275,938

The daily pace tells the same story. In all of August there were 3,515 new .si registrations. In the 24 hours to 28 September there were 4,311, more than the whole of August in one day. On 4 October the registry's 24-hour counter read 11,059.

New .si registrations: all of August vs a single day

	New registrations
All of August 2026	3,515
24 hours to 28 Sep	4,311
24 hours to 4 Oct	11,059

Netcraft's analysis adds the shape of the rush:

• It started before the speech. The first wave followed a Truth Social poll about rebranding AI, posted at 15:29 UTC on 19 September.
• Overtaking .ai. .si registrations passed .ai in the 25 hours after the UN speech.
• Twins. More than 44,000 registered .si names share their second-level string with a .ai domain, about 22% of the zone, and 1,500 of those pairs resolve to the same IP address.
• Speculators, not builders. About 52% of the .si names Netcraft saw registered at Dynadot between the poll and the speech were already listed on Dynadot's aftermarket.

Rules and prices

• Who can register: anyone, anywhere. No Slovenian residency or company is needed; names are first come, first served.
• Registry price: ARNES, which runs Register.si, charges registrars €10 per year. It raised the price from €8 on 1 January 2023, citing new obligations such as the NIS2 Directive and rising operating costs, after keeping €8 since 2015. Domain Name Wire estimates September's surge brought the registry about €300,000 extra.
• Retail: Hostinger lists $11.99 for the first year and $16.99 a year to renew. Netcraft quotes about $11 for a year of .si against about $180 for the two-year minimum on .ai. Some registrars price selected .si names as premium, so check the renewal price, not the first-year promo.

My check: 87 AI-flavoured names

On 28 September 2026 I queried the registry's own WHOIS server (whois.register.si) for two lists: 48 short, obvious AI words (things like gpt, llm, agi, data, brain) and 39 "SI"-branded compounds (super- and si- prefixes, try-, ask-, -news, -jobs, -fund). I am reporting the counts rather than a per-domain table: ARNES's WHOIS terms say you may not "copy, extract and/or publish" the contents of its database, and the point here is the pattern, not who owns what. The script is at the end, so you can run your own list.

Short, obvious names: 48 checked, 48 taken, none new

Every one was taken, and none had been registered after the speech. The newest current registration in this list dated from late July 2026. Several went back to the late 1990s, and a cluster of LLM-era words was registered between 2022 and 2024. A few sat with brand-protection registrars, the kind large companies use to hold defensive names. The obvious names were never available to this rush.

"SI" compounds: 39 checked, 32 taken, 13 of them since 19 September

This is where the speculation shows. Of the 32 taken compounds, 13 had been created between the Truth Social poll and my check, and 7 of those 13 went through Dynadot, the registrar whose aftermarket Netcraft found full of fresh .si listings. Most of the other 19 had been registered in 2024 to 2026, many of them at the same registrar: domain investors were holding "super" and "si" names well before anyone in government said the word.

The seven that were free, one week later

Seven compounds were still unregistered on 28 September: usesi.si, heysi.si, sipodcast.si, superintelligencenews.si, siweekly.si, sidaily.si and buildsi.si. I checked them again on 4 October. Five of the seven had been registered, all between 30 September and 2 October, and at least one was already pointing at a domain-parking service. Only sipodcast.si and siweekly.si were still free. If a name on your list is free today, assume it will not be in a week.

Is there a real opportunity?

For building something, maybe. A short, pronounceable .si name costs about as much as a .com and a small fraction of the .ai minimum, with no residency hoops. If your product plays on "SI", it is a cheap, legitimate choice. Register it for yourself, not for resale.

For flipping, the data argues against it. The valuable single words were gone years ago. The compounds left are the kind thousands of people are registering in the same week, and more than half of one registrar's early batch was listed for sale within days. Their value depends on whether "SI" outlives a US government style guide and becomes a term people actually type. The .ai boom was driven by a whole industry adopting a word it already used; "SI" so far has one prominent speaker. Renewals are where speculative portfolios bleed: at Hostinger's $16.99 renewal, 1,000 names cost about $17,000 a year to hold.

Two practical warnings if you own a .ai brand:

• Check your .si twin. Netcraft counted 44,000+ names that exist in both zones, many not resolving to the same place. It also notes that s and a sit next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard, so yourbrand.si works as a typosquat of yourbrand.ai.
• Fraud is low today, per Netcraft, but a TLD that suddenly becomes desirable tends to attract phishing later. A €10-a-year defensive registration is cheaper than a takedown.

Check your own list

The registry's WHOIS output is tab-separated (domain:, registrar:, created: followed by tabs), and a free name returns only comment lines ending in % No entries found. The script below relies on exactly that, and prints a TSV you keep for yourself.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Usage: ./si-check.sh names.txt  -> name, status, created, registrar (TSV)
while read -r n; do
  out=$(whois -h whois.register.si "$n.si" 2>/dev/null | grep -v '^%')
  if printf '%s\n' "$out" | grep -q '^domain:'; then
    created=$(printf '%s\n' "$out" | awk -F'\t+' '/^created:/{print $2}')
    reg=$(printf '%s\n' "$out" | awk -F'\t+' '/^registrar:/{print $2}')
    printf '%s.si\ttaken\t%s\t%s\n' "$n" "$created" "$reg"
  else
    printf '%s.si\tfree\t-\t-\n' "$n"
  fi
  sleep 1.5
done < "$1"

printf '%s\n' yourbrand yourbrandai getyourbrand > names.txt
chmod +x si-check.sh
./si-check.sh names.txt

The 1.5-second pause keeps you well inside polite WHOIS use. Use the output to decide what to register, not to publish lists of other people's domains or to contact their owners: ARNES's terms forbid both.

Sources

• Axios: Trump orders AI rebrand as "super intelligence" (22 September 2026)
• Deseret News: Trump's remarks at the UN General Assembly (22 September 2026)
• Aaron Rupar on X: clip of the UN remarks
• Domain Name Wire: Slovenia's .si grows more than 15% after Trump's UN speech (28 September 2026)
• Netcraft: Slovenian .SI registrations outpace .AI
• Register.si: live registration counters (read 4 October 2026)
• Register.si: price increase for .si domain names
• Hostinger: .si pricing
• Registry WHOIS: whois.register.si, queried 28 September and 4 October 2026