News

British territories ride wave of tech boom - .AI and .IO

18 November 2025

Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory in the Eastern Caribbean and home to around just 16,000 people, has struck digital gold of late with its .AI extension, bringing in US$62 million in revenue in just the first three quarters of 2025 from .AI domain name registrations. The year prior to that, the British Indian Ocean Territory, an archipelago comprised of seven atolls and over 1,000 individual islands, the sovereignty of which is currently in the process of being handed over by the British government to Mauritius, saw sales of its .IO domain names increase by 6.7%, mainly due to the association of the extension with the world of information technology.

Both .AI and .IO have profited from the serendipitous alignment of their extensions with the current Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven tech boom – the former due to its reflection of the acronym for Artificial Intelligence, and the latter due to the semantic appeal of the abbreviation “I/O” (input/output), a term that describes the way computers and other information systems communicate with the world and which resonates with IT platforms, startups and developers.

Chapter 1 .AI

.AI domain name registrations have surged from 48,000 in 2018 to around 880,000 in September 2025. In 2023, the Anguillan government, which receives a fee for every .AI domain name registered, generated roughly US$32 million from .AI domain name registrations, a figure that made up nearly 20% of the island's total government revenue. By 2024, that figure had jumped to about US$39 million, accounting for around one-quarter of Anguilla's annual income.

Anguilla's Premier, Ellis Webster, has stated that revenue from the .AI boom will be used to finance the island's airport expansion, to subsidise free medical care for senior citizens, to enable the completion of a vocational technology training centre at Anguilla's high school, and to put in place hurricane-resilient infrastructure, including secure domain-hosting facilities.

With .AI domain name renewal rates hovering at around 90% and government projections showing that .AI domain name revenues will reach approximately US$49 million in 2025 and nearly US$51 million by 2026, the future looks bright for Anguilla.

Chapter 2 .IO

The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) is a British Overseas Territory established in 1965, comprising a group of islands in the central Indian Ocean. The territory was created when the UK separated the islands from Mauritius and the Seychelles in order to establish a U.S. military base on the atoll Diego Garcia.

Although BIOT has no official permanent residents (only temporary US military personnel and UK government officials), the .IO domain name extension was delegated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the British government as the country-code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) for BIOT in 1997. Over the last decade, the .IO Registry has re-branded itself as a tech-friendly global TLD and, indeed, the extension is treated as a generic Top-Level Domain by many search engines, compounding its popularity.

.IO domain name registrations grew from approximately 660,000 in 2021 to over 1.6 million by 2025 with the UK-based Registry, Internet Computer Bureau, last month reporting revenue for 2024 of £31.6 million ($42.4 million), up from £29.6 million ($39.7 million) in 2023. Revenue has grown a whopping 93% since 2021, with a sharp surge in 2022 (around 59% year-on-year) and steady growth ever since.

It's not all plain sailing for the .IO TLD, though. The future of the extension is somewhat uncertain due to the ongoing sovereignty questions concerning BIOT, which is in the process of being handed over by the British to Mauritius. Uncertainty over whether the transfer of control could lead to changes in the administration of the .IO Registry, or even the complete retirement of the TLD, has sparked concerns among investors, tech companies, and domain registrants. For the time being, however, reassurances of a long lead-in time for any such changes appear to be mitigating any such fears and failing to dampen enthusiasm for the TLD. Nevertheless, registrants should bear in mind that there are inherent risks attached to the .IO extension and they should have an adequate back-up plan in place.

For more information on the registration of .AI and .IO domain names, please contact David Taylor or Jane Seager.