Anguilla Made $85 Million Selling .ai Web Addresses. Only 13% of Caribbean Adults Use the Technology

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Anguilla is a 91 square kilometre British Overseas Territory with a population smaller than most Caribbean secondary schools' full alumni rolls. In 2025 it earned $85.3 million from a single line item: registrations of its country-code domain, .ai, according to reporting by PYMNTS.com on the territory's 2026 budget. That windfall helped push the budget into surplus. It is, by a wide margin, one of the most improbable revenue streams in the modern Caribbean economy, and it exists entirely because two letters assigned to a small island in the 1990s turned out to spell the biggest technology story of the 2020s.

Here is the part that does not fit the celebration. Across the wider Caribbean, only about 13 percent of adults aged 18 to 65 report using generative AI tools, according to survey findings reported by the Jamaica Observer in May 2026, against a global adoption estimate of roughly 55 percent. The region that is quietly profiting from renting out the name of the technology is, by most measures, still near the back of the queue for using it. That is not a contradiction to resolve with better marketing. It is two different projects on two different timelines, and only one of them is finished.

Two Letters, Eighty-Five Million Dollars

The .ai domain has been Anguilla's country code since the early internet era, assigned under the same convention that gave Tuvalu .tv and Colombia .co. For most of its history it was an administrative footnote, registered mainly by companies with "AI" somewhere in their name out of coincidence rather than ambition. The generative AI boom changed that overnight. Startups, labs and even household-name technology firms now compete for .ai addresses specifically because the letters read as a category statement, and Anguilla's registry, run through a commercial partner, collects a fee on every one.

$85.3 million is not a rounding error for a territory of Anguilla's size. It is revenue on the scale of a mid-size export industry, generated with no factory, no port expansion and no new AI company incorporated locally. It is also, worth saying plainly, revenue that has nothing to do with Anguillians using AI, building AI, or benefiting from AI beyond the fiscal transfer. The domain economy and the technology economy are related only by branding. A territory can be a landlord to the world's AI naming boom and still be a bystander to the AI economy itself, and for the moment, that is roughly Anguilla's position, and the wider region's too.

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The Thirteen Percent Problem

Thirteen percent is the headline figure, but the detail underneath it is more useful than the number itself. The same regional reporting put generative AI adoption among micro, small and medium enterprises at closer to 19 percent, meaningfully higher than the individual figure but still well short of the levels seen in markets with comparable internet penetration. Caribbean connectivity is not the bottleneck it was a decade ago. Mobile broadband coverage across most of the region is strong, and the infrastructure to run AI tools on an ordinary phone or laptop is already in most people's pockets. The gap is not access. It is training, trust, and, for a large share of small businesses, simply not knowing where to start.

I see this constantly in the training rooms StarApple AI runs across the region, from bank boardrooms to community centres. The people who eventually adopt AI tools are rarely blocked by the technology itself. They are blocked by never having had thirty structured minutes to try it with someone who could answer their first three questions. Once that happens, adoption tends to stick, and it compounds through a team or a family faster than most people expect. The 13 percent figure is not a verdict on Caribbean readiness. It is a measurement of how much structured exposure has actually happened, and that number is still small relative to the region's population.

The Forum That Just Wrapped in Trinidad

This is where the governance side of the story caught up, and it caught up this week. The Caribbean AI Forum 2026 ran July 23 and 24 at UWI St Augustine, hosted by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union in partnership with the university and the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre, under the theme AI for Caribbean Transformation. At the Forum, the CTU officially launched the Caribbean AI Task Force's Final Report, the product of nine months of work by more than 35 experts drawn from governments, academia, civil society and the private sector across the region. The report lays out a strategic roadmap for harmonised AI governance, regional cooperation on shared infrastructure, and a practical implementation path that CARICOM member states can actually follow rather than merely endorse.

The timing lines up with a second governance milestone that landed the same month. In July 2026, the UNESCO Office for the Caribbean presented its Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Policy Roadmap to the 126th Special Meeting of the Council for Trade and Economic Development, Information and Communication Technologies, a principal CARICOM organ, and COTED-ICT endorsed it. Two separate processes, one led by a UN agency and one by the region's own telecommunications body, arrived at governance frameworks within weeks of each other. For a region that has spent years being told its AI policy was fragmented and behind schedule, having two credible frameworks converge in the same month is genuine progress, not a formality to note in passing.

What Two National Strategies Won't Fix Alone

At least two CARICOM states, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, are expected to publish their own national AI strategies before the end of 2026. Both countries are also where AI infrastructure investment is landing fastest. Huawei Cloud's Model as a Service rollout has reached both Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, according to Jamaica Observer reporting from May 2026, and Trinidad and Tobago has separately signed memorandums of understanding for hundreds of megawatts of AI data centre capacity. Governance frameworks, national strategies and physical infrastructure are all now moving in the same direction and roughly the same timeframe, which has not always been true of Caribbean technology policy.

None of that automatically produces adoption. A national AI strategy sets direction for government procurement and public investment. It does not, by itself, put a working knowledge of AI tools into a shop owner's hands in Montego Bay or a nurse's workflow in Port of Spain. The infrastructure and the governance can both be excellent and the 13 percent figure can still barely move, because adoption is a training and trust problem that gets solved person by person and business by business, not by a roadmap document, however well written. The Task Force's own recommendations acknowledge this directly, with AI literacy and capacity building named as one of its five core pillars alongside governance, infrastructure and sector-specific innovation support.

The Plain Version

Strip away the acronyms and the story is straightforward. The Caribbean has spent the past year proving it can win on the parts of the AI economy that reward being early and being small: a country code nobody wanted twenty years ago, a regional governance process that moved from mandate to final report in nine months, a UN-backed policy roadmap endorsed inside a single CARICOM meeting cycle. What the region has not yet proven is that it can close the much larger, much slower gap between owning a piece of the AI economy and actually using the technology at the rate the rest of the world already does. Eighty-five million dollars from letters is real money. Getting adoption from 13 percent toward global norms is the harder, longer job, and it is the one that determines whether the next decade of this story is written by Caribbean people or about them.