OpenAI buys AI.com for $11 million, making it one of the top 10 most expensive domains ever sold

ChatGPT has become a worldwide phenomenon, further pushing artificial intelligence (AI) into the mainstream. In less than three months, the OpenAI’s chatbot reached 100 million monthly active users in January, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. ChatGPT could do virtually everything from writing poetry, and correcting coding mistakes with detailed examples, to generating AI art prompts.

However, a year before the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI’ acquired one of the internet’s most expensive real estate assets: AI.com. The sale was first reported by the domain industry news site DomainInvesting.com. According to the report, Saw.com, a domain brokerage firm, reported that it sold AI.com “to someone in the NFT space” for $11 million, making it one of the top 10 most expensive domains ever sold.

“When I saw AI.com had transferred to a different domain registrar, I reached out to Saw.com’s Jeff Gabriel and Amanda Waltz to see if the domain name had sold. Jeff responded to my query and confirmed that AI.com has been sold by FMA. Although the purchase price is not going to be announced, I understand the asking price for AI.com was $11 million. Jeff told me it was sold “to someone in the NFT space,” DomainInvesting.com founder Elliot Silver said in a blog post.

The identity of the buyer was not revealed until a few days after the launch of ChatGPT when AI.com redirected to https://chat.openai.com/chat, further confirming that OpenAI was the buyer.

While you may be thinking OpenAI overpaid for the domain, the ChatGPT-maker recently received a reported $10 billion in additional funding from Microsoft in exchange for a 49% stake in the company. However, there’s something interesting about the $11 million sales price.

As we reported on many occasions, OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman along with 20 others with the mission of developing and promoting friendly artificial intelligence, with the goal of advancing and ensuring the beneficial use of AI in society.

What’s unknown to most people is that Elon Musk also paid $11 million to acquire Tesla.com. In Third Row Tesla Podcast, Musk told the story of how it took about a decade to finally get Silicon Valley engineer Stuart Grossman to sell the rights to Tesla.com. Musk said:

“That took us 10 years to buy that Tesla.com domain. That cost us like, $10 million.”

But in 2018, Musk said on Twitter that it actually cost $11 million, and took an “amazing amount of effort,” to get the domain name off Grossman.

“Buying http://Tesla.com took over a decade, $11M & amazing amount of effort. Didn’t like http://teslamotors.com even when we were only making,” Musk tweeted.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1071617709413003264

AI.com and Tesla.com are just two of the most expensive domain names ever sold. In 2019, we also reported the sale of Voice.com after Peter Thiel-backed crypto startup Block.one bought Voice.com for $30 million for its new blockchain-based social media platform Voice.

Voice.com was sold for $30 million in cash by Microstrategy, a company founded by Michael Saylor. MicroStrategy holds more than a dozen ultra-premium domain names including:

To learn more about these domain names, please visit www.microstrategy.com/domains.