Charles Le Roux, Salt, 1740–45. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.
Anguilla has no data centres, no chip plants and no AI lab of note. It has 16,000 people and two letters. In 2025 those letters brought in an estimated $93 million, and the technology minister, Jose Vanterpool, told the BBC that .ai domain sales were expected to fund nearly half of government revenue that year. The 2026 budget closed in surplus, largely on that income.
I think this story matters to the rest of the Caribbean for a reason beyond luck. Anguilla is the one clear exception to a pattern Anthropic's data confirmed again this year: the gains from AI are gathering in the countries that were already ahead.
How two letters became half a government budget
Two-letter country codes come from the ISO 3166 standard, and Anguilla was assigned "AI" decades before anyone linked the letters to artificial intelligence. When the AI funding boom arrived, .ai became the default web address for companies that wanted their name to say what they do.
- More than a million .ai domains were registered by the start of 2026, with about 2,000 new registrations a day in January.
- About 28 percent of newly founded tech start-ups now choose .ai over .com.
- Registry revenue rose from about $2.9 million in 2018 to $39 million in 2024, according to figures reported by Semafor, and to an estimated $93 million in 2025, as reported by Domaintechnik.
- In February 2026 bot.ai sold for $1.2 million, the highest publicly known .ai domain sale.
The government spent the money on airport expansion, roads, tax relief and health services, according to reporting on the 2026 budget. A small administration turned a technology cycle into public works within one budget year.
What Anthropic's usage data shows about the Caribbean
Anthropic's Economic Index is built from actual Claude usage, not surveys. In the March 2026 report, the top 20 countries by per-capita usage accounted for 48 percent of all per-capita usage, up from 45 percent in the previous period. Inside the United States the trend runs the other way: the top 10 states' share fell from 40 to 38 percent, and Anthropic's researchers project full state-level convergence within five to nine years.
A companion analysis found that a 1 percent rise in a country's GDP per working-age person goes with roughly a 0.7 percent rise in Claude usage per person. The report names countries using Claude below the rate their population would predict: Indonesia at 0.36 times, India at 0.27, Nigeria at 0.2 and Bolivia at 0.48. Most Caribbean countries do not appear in the country breakdowns at all, because their usage is too small to report.
If usage follows income this closely, training programmes alone will not move a small, import-dependent economy up the ranking. They are still worth running. They just work on a slower clock than the ranking does.
Anguilla gained without adopting more AI
Anguilla did not close the usage gap. Its residents almost certainly use AI assistants less per head than the countries at the top of Anthropic's list. What it did was own an asset the AI industry wanted, and charge for it. That is a different route to value, and it is open to countries that will never lead a usage ranking.
The next windfalls are in chips, power and cables
Reuters reported in mid-June 2026 that Qualcomm was in advanced talks to buy the AI chip start-up Tenstorrent for $8 billion to $10 billion, to compete with Nvidia and AMD in AI accelerators. Tenstorrent, founded in 2016 and led by the chip architect Jim Keller, builds on the open RISC-V architecture, which lowers the cost of designing custom AI chips.
No Caribbean territory is about to build a chip company. The point of the deal is where the money is going: into chips, power, data centres and the subsea cables that connect them. Small economies are more likely to earn from that layer through what they can host than through what they can build: land, electricity, cable landings and a legal framework data customers trust.
The Dominican Republic has started on this. Reporting in February 2026 described agreements to make it a regional technology hub, including infrastructure commitments involving Nvidia and Google and a subsea cable project. None of that will show up in a usage ranking, because the value comes from hosting infrastructure, not from chatbot use.
At StarApple AI, which I founded as the Caribbean's first AI company, we have spent the past two years pushing regional partners to measure what assets a territory holds that the AI industry needs, alongside how many people use AI tools. The Caribbean AI Association makes a version of this case at policy level, and national groups, from the AI Jamaica to the Caribbean AI network's Guyana and Barbados chapters and Saint Lucia's and Trinidad and Tobago's national AI bodies, are the ones placed to turn it into government policy. The Caribbean AI Risk Management Council tracks the governance side.
Where the asset argument is weakest
Power. Data centres need cheap, steady electricity, and Caribbean electricity prices are among the highest in the Americas because most islands still burn imported fuel. Add hurricane exposure and the fact that many islands depend on one or two subsea cables, and most of the region cannot yet offer what a data centre operator wants. Anguilla's asset needed nothing physical. The next ones will, and I do not yet know which Caribbean countries can supply them at a competitive price. Countries with large renewable potential, such as Guyana with its hydro plans or the geothermal prospects in Dominica and Saint Kitts and Nevis, are the ones I would watch.
What to do next
- Ministries of finance and ICT: run a 90-day audit of what the country could offer the AI industry, covering electricity price for a large steady load, number of subsea cables, data protection law, available land and any specialist skills pool, and publish the results.
- Telecoms regulators: pull the contract for your country-code registry and confirm who runs it, when it expires and what share of fees the government receives. Renegotiate before a suffix becomes valuable, not after.
- Energy ministries and utility regulators: publish an indicative tariff for a steady 10 to 50 megawatt load, the first number any data centre operator will ask for.
- Attorneys general and data protection offices: compare the national data law against the EU's GDPR and list the gaps, since hosting customers will ask whether data kept on the island meets that standard.
- Universities and industry groups: pick one narrow specialism where Caribbean expertise is scarce elsewhere, such as hurricane risk modelling or Caribbean language data, and build a cohort of specialists in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does .ai registration money reach Anguilla's government?
The Government of Anguilla controls the .ai country-code registry and pays a contractor to run the technical side; since 2024 that has been Identity Digital. Registrars such as GoDaddy or Namecheap pay the registry a wholesale fee for each domain registered or renewed, and the government's share goes into general revenue. Because most domains renew every year or two, the income recurs as long as companies keep their .ai names.
Has any other country earned money this way?
Yes. Tuvalu's .tv and Colombia's .co are the best-known earlier cases, and both earned from a meaning their letters happened to have. The lesson for other governments is to check who runs their registry, on what contract terms and for what share of the fees, since several small states signed long contracts before their suffix had any value.
Does the Anthropic Economic Index measure all AI use in a country?
No. It measures use of Claude, one assistant, so a country where people mostly use ChatGPT, Gemini or a local tool can look smaller than it is. It is still useful because the method is published and the underlying data is released openly, so anyone can check a country's figures. Treat it as one measure of the trend, and look for national surveys before drawing conclusions about a specific Caribbean country.
What should a Caribbean government check before trying to attract a data centre?
Operators look first at the price and reliability of electricity, then at fibre: at least two separate subsea cables so one break does not cut the site off. They also check water for cooling, hurricane and flood risk at the site, and whether the data protection law will satisfy their customers. Price power per kilowatt-hour for a large, steady load before any conversation, because that number usually ends the discussion or starts it.
Where can Caribbean policymakers get help thinking through AI assets?
Regional bodies are the place to start: the Caribbean AI Association works on policy, the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council covers governance and risk, and national groups such as the Jamaica Artificial Intelligence Association work at country level. For infrastructure finance, the Caribbean Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank both fund digital and energy projects and publish their current lending priorities.