If you’ve been fortunate to spend time traveling to other countries, you’ll quickly learn that .com is less important to businesses in some countries. In European countries, local businesses tend to use their own ccTLD extensions. I’ve enjoyed visits to many countries in Europe, and while the biggest – global brands or brands with global aspirations – use .com, the smaller businesses frequently use their local extension.

I was recently doing some outbound marketing on a two word .com domain name. There were numerous businesses that incorporated these two words in their brands, and one operated on the .com.au extension. I thought this Australian company might have an interest in my .com domain name to show its global reach. I was wrong. The CEO of the company told me there was no interest in acquiring my domain name:

Andy Booth recently reported the $220,000 sale of Sim.ai. Based on the screenshot he shared, it appears he sold it directly to the buyer using Escrow.com to transact.

These are strange days. I know you can all feel it. Something is upon us. Our sim is changing.

Sale loading: https://t.co/cGQPcsuvn0 for $220k pic.twitter.com/7pHniCZOp5

— AB (@360) July 22, 2025

The $220,000 sale of Sim.ai is the fifth largest .AI domain name sale, year to date, according to NameBio.

This afternoon, James Booth announced the $600,000 sale of Cloud.ai. The domain name was acquired anonymously by the buyer using GoDaddy’s Domain Broker Service (DBS). The buyer was represented by GoDaddy broker Tim Perkins.

The incredible 1-word domain https://t.co/YeFBSiQ7DG has just sold for a gross price of $600,000 USD! 💥
Sale completed via GoDaddy Brokerage Services which is a powerful signal of the growing strength of the .AI domain market. pic.twitter.com/WHXJY4TyBe

— Domain (@domain) July 2, 2025

Tim Hargis alerted me to a LinkedIn post by Kushal Byatnal announcing that his company, Extend, had acquired the Extend.ai domain name for $50,000. The company had been using Extend.app, but it chose to spend mid-five figures to acquire the .ai domain name. You can see the rationale in the LinkedIn post:

Instead of covering this acquisition with a standalone article, I opted to post about it on X. I think this domain name sale was noteworthy, particularly because the Founder shared insight about the domain name and its importance to the company rather than simply sharing the acquisition price.

The aftermarket for .AI domain names has grown tremendously over the last several years. A look at Namebio shows the growing annual dollar volume of sales that were publicly reported in the aftermarket.

• 2018: $420.8k
• 2019: $1.1m
• 2020: $1.1m
• 2021: $1.2m
• 2022: $878.7k
• 2023: $5.6m
• 2024: $11.7m
• 2025 YTD: $3.2m (my guess is $20m+ for the year)

These aftermarket sales figures do not take into account the number of domain names that have been hand registered by buyers for the registration fee. The .AI registry requires a 2 year registration, and the cost is approaching $100/year. By all accounts, the number of .AI registrations is also growing at a considerable rate.