As artificial intelligence technology is commercialized across businesses, the number of companies and startups providing AI solutions is increasing. Accordingly, the number of cases of adopting 'ai', which is more expensive than 'com' and 'kr', which are commonly used as top-level domains, is also increasing.

Companies that focus on AI solutions often adopt .AI as the top-level domain, such as .COM, when building their own homepages. △Furiosa AI, which makes AI semiconductors, △Kakao's AI platform 'Kakao i', and △Naver's AI platform 'Naver Clova' use '.ai' as their domain names.

According to global hosting and domain services company Marcaria.com, there were 132,357 .AI domains as of January 2023, a 12% increase over the past 10 months. With the increase in AI platforms and companies, the dot ai domain is growing exponentially.

According to Gabia, which provides domestic domain services, the price of major domains such as △com △net △org △biz △info is 22,000 won per year excluding VAT, while 'ai' is priced at 125,000 won per year, which is 5.6 times more expensive.

Some say that this is because the AI industry is becoming more active and AI companies are preferring ai domains instead of dot-com domains. In the dot-com domain, there are many cases where appropriate domain names are already duplicated. Therefore, AI companies are finding solutions through ai domains.

The Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) announced that it will expand the scope of Internet address dispute mediation to 41 overseas country domains, including .AI, in July 2022. At the time, it mentioned that “recently, startup companies such as NFT and blockchain companies have been registering new domains such as △ai △co △bz instead of domains such as COM and NET, which has increased by about 5 to 10 times over the past five years.”

According to 'Characteristics and Implications of VC Investment in the AI Field' by Choi Sae-sol, a researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), the number of AI startups established worldwide confirmed in Crunchbase DB was around 200 in early 2010, but the number of new startups jumped to around 1,000 from mid-2010, reaching 2,000 in 2017.

As building a website has become an essential digital solution for businesses, the prices of dot-coms and dot-ai are expected to continue to rise. Last November, Gabia raised the price of dot-com domains by 10% from 20,000 won to 22,000 won along with △NET △ORG △BIZ △INFO, citing the suppliers' cost increase and the continued rise in the exchange rate.
In the case of Dot AI, the price was already raised from 200,000 won (2 years) to 250,000 won in April of the previous year, showing a 25% increase. At that time, Gabia announced through a notice that “the price of Dot AI will change due to an increase in the cost of Key-Systems, a domain supplier.”

Meanwhile, dot.ai is the national top-level domain of Anguilla, a British territory, and has been available for registration by anyone anywhere in the world without restrictions since it was released to the public in 2006. Among domestic domain service providers, Whois was the first to open domestic dot.ai domain registration.