James Booth has had a lot of success with the .ai extension, including announcing a $100K sale of CloudX.ai on Atom yesterday.
In a post on X James wrote:
The amount of people fading .ai truly blows my mind. You have so many top domain investors shitting on the extension when countless others are making a killing.
Look at any place that shows recent funding for the last 1,000 raises and see their domain or area of business. All it is, is people trying to protect their own bags when with .ai there is not much of a wholesale market other than auctions. Everyone that buys them holds and sells to retail.
Advice to not buy / register junk is across the board on all extensions but if you work out what is likely to sell then you can get great sales. Trust your gut, follow the money and don’t listen to the haters. Facts speak louder
There certainly have been some voices that have been negative on .ai, I remember toward the end of 2024 there were some saying it had peaked. They were wrong, that’s not opinion. 2025 .ai only needed 9 months to almost surpass 2023 and 2024 combined in total dollars.
There is a concentration of great names in a few hands but still there are some big sales from those who just dabble in .ai. 2026 will be an interesting year for .ai.
good work
but a bubble is still a bubble.
cloudxai.com is what people will type in.
I agree with James.
It is interesting 1300 GTLD’s and none of them really broke out and then you have an extension that actually does break out, is meaningful, in demand and end users are scooping them up and actually opening up businesses with them and domain investors don’t want to believe it.
All you have to do is look at the DN Journal top 100 sales for the last three years and look at the momentum.
And some of the companies operating under .AI are the biggest players in the space and that’s the biggest reason.
Lastly in 30 years I poo pooed every other extensions other than dotcom because they were foolish and worthless and most domain investors lost their shirts.
That alone should make you stop and think. Why now? Why .AI?
And maybe the rejection comes from the cost. They’re not exactly cheap to register. The carrying costs are high. And it isn’t quite as universal as other extensions. And that means if you buy pigeon shit, you’re gonna lose your ass. So you have to know what you’re doing with that category. You have to be much more sophisticated to make sure that what you’re picking is actually something an end user would value.
100, dotcom cost about $1100 to carry. It’s easier to speculate and gamble.
100 .ai domains would have an entry of $18,000 to register for their two-year period. That eliminates the majority of domain investors and gives birth to their rejection.