.chip
Is .chip a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .chip in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. Radix named .chip as the backup string of its .wallet application.
A clean tech word riding the silicon boom, but chip companies favor established domains, so expect niche use rather than a standard.
semiconductor and AI-hardware startups, chip-design tool vendors, dev-board and maker-hardware brands seeking a short literal tech identity; secondarily electronics retailers and snack/poker novelty registrants
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “Small silicon, enormous impact.”
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: a single generic hardware-product noun that no one company owns, sold to a whole electronics/tech industry as a category address, and it only works if enough of that industry decides the category word beats their own brand at the second level.
Same shape of bet — short, mass-familiar consumer-device noun as an open category TLD — but the buyer pool skews retail/carrier rather than the manufacturer-and-supplier base a component word depends on.
The closest component-level parallel: a plain electronics-part noun betting that a B2B supply chain (makers, distributors, spec sheets) will anchor identity on the part it sells, though its plural trade-catalog framing is narrower and less consumer-legible than the target.
What a .chip domain is
.chip is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under AI & tech. Nobody has applied for .chip in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .chip domain extension real yet?
.chip is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .chip domain?
You can’t yet. A .chip name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .chip was .computer, delegated on 17 December 2013.
Is .chip a real TLD?
Not yet. .chip is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .chip as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Radix · first recordedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“RTIS2674T-T15545 · Radix Technologies Inc SEZC · replacement string of .wallet”ICANN
“.chip · Tech & Electronics · “Small silicon, enormous impact.””Journey To The West Corporation
- Band 30-49 (usable but limited), at its low end. It clears the 10-29 band because 'chip' is a real dictionary word anchoring a genuinely hot vertical — AI silicon, chip design, embedded hardware — so registrations beyond novelty are plausible, not purely event-driven. It stays below 50-69 because there is no observed primary-identity demand: by analogy (flagged as such), hardware-adjacent strings like .hardware, .computer, and .electronics drew thin registration bases and negligible aftermarkets, while serious semiconductor firms have historically branded on legacy TLDs and AI-adjacent buyers gravitated to .ai. The word's ambiguity (silicon, poker, snacks, pets) further dilutes brand signal. Main market uncertainty: whether the AI-hardware startup wave produces a cohort willing to adopt a novelty TLD as primary identity, or continues defaulting to .com/.ai. Applicant is a Beijing-based portfolio applicant with 323 submitted strings (per facts); portfolio breadth says nothing negative but leaves per-string marketing support unknown.