tld.report · The 2026 Round

Snapshot of 8 October 2026 · ICANN APS, public fields

Articles / AI in the round · 4 · Published 15 October 2026 · Translated from the French original

Article · AI in the round · 4

Not Nvidia, not DeepSeek, not Musk: the round's absentees

None of the round's 1,614 applications names Nvidia, DeepSeek or a company of Elon Musk's. On the Chinese side, ByteDance, Alibaba and Huawei file their brands; Tencent, an applicant in 2012, does not come back.

None of the 1,614 applications names Nvidia, DeepSeek or a company of Elon Musk's

A round is usually read through those who take part in it. The absentees can be measured too, provided one says what was searched for. In the public fields of the 1,614 applications, collected on 8 October1, none contains Nvidia or its products (GeForce, CUDA, DGX, Omniverse, Jetson), nor its Chinese spellings. None contains DeepSeek, its Chinese name or the companies behind it (Hangzhou DeepSeek, High-Flyer). None contains Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X Corp, Grok, Starlink or Neuralink. The same search does find the names known to be there: ByteDance in nine applications, Anthropic in four, Baidu in two.

None of these names is an applied-for string either, among the primary strings or among the 1,169 replacement strings published on Reveal Day2.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft file again, Nvidia does not file

Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon had applied for their names in 20123, and .google, .apple, .microsoft and .amazon are in the root today4. Three of them came back in 2026 for other strings: Google has 39 applications, including .gemini, .deepmind and .waymo, Amazon 8, including .alexa and .kuiper, Microsoft 2, .copilot and .msft. Apple has none. Nvidia had no application in 2012, has no extension in the root, and has no application in 2026.

It is not alone in this. None of the big names in semiconductors, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, TSMC, Broadcom, Micron, ASML or Arm, is an applicant in 2026, and none has an extension under its name in the root today.

On the Chinese side, ByteDance, Alibaba and Huawei file their brands

Seventy-six applications come from an applicant based in mainland China (51), Hong Kong (21) or Taiwan (4). The three big Chinese groups present file their brands as closed TLDs; Alibaba also applies, through a Hong Kong company, for three common words, .agent, .api and .skill.

.doubao, ByteDance's assistant, is applied for by Beijing Zitiao Network Technology, controlled by Bytedance Ltd., in the Cayman Islands; the application reserves registration to "Doubao and its affiliated entities"5. .qwen is applied for from Singapore by Alibaba Innovation Private Limited, which defines it as "[a] trademark of a globally recognized AI Large Language Model (LLM)"6. .huawei, applied for by Huawei Technologies, is reserved to the group's companies7.

The Chinese model developers most often cited appear in no application: not DeepSeek, Moonshot, Zhipu, MiniMax, StepFun, Baichuan, iFlytek or SenseTime, under their Latin or Chinese names. Baidu and Alibaba already have their extensions from the previous round (.baidu; .alibaba, .taobao, .tmall, .alipay). Tencent had applied for .weibo and 微博 in 2012 and withdrew them; it is not an applicant in 2026, and no extension under its names (tencent, qq, wechat, weixin, 腾讯) is in the root.

To watch

  • From 17 November 2026 to 16 March 2027: the comment and objection period8. We will look at whether any of these absentees comments on or objects to an application.

Sources

  1. ICANN, New gTLD Program, Application Processing System, public summary and responses of the 1,614 applications (summary and responses of each application; terms searched on 2026-10-15) · retrieved 8 October 2026Not read: the applications' attachments; for .doubao, .qwen and .huawei only the answers cited were read
  2. ICANN, Reveal Day export, gTLD applications, 2,783 rows (1,614 primary strings and 1,169 replacement strings), 7 October 2026 (export of the public site; columns Primary String and Applicant Name) · retrieved 7 October 2026
  3. ICANN, New gTLD Program 2012, application status list (columns string, applicant, status) · retrieved 7 October 2026Not read: the list was not reconciled with the official total of 2012 applications
  4. IANA, List of top-level domains, version 2026101500, 15 October 2026 · retrieved 15 October 2026
  5. ICANN, Application BZNT2680T-T49729, .doubao, Beijing Zitiao Network Technology Co., Ltd. (questions 1, 36, 108 and 133) · retrieved 8 October 2026Not read: the other answers and the attachments
  6. ICANN, Application AIPL2696T-T43947, .qwen, ALIBABA INNOVATION PRIVATE LIMITED (questions 1, 4, 36, 118 and 133) · retrieved 8 October 2026Not read: the other answers and the attachments
  7. ICANN, Application HTCL2692T-T25968, .huawei, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (questions 1, 36 and 133) · retrieved 8 October 2026Not read: the other answers and the attachments
  8. ICANN, ICANN Announces Date for Reveal Day and Other 2026 Round Milestones, 29 September 2026 · retrieved 10 October 2026

These sources as data (JSON)

The search covers the public fields of the applications, not the attachments or the confidential parts; a subsidiary filing under another name without citing its parent would not show up. The list of terms searched is the whole scope of the sentences "none contains": a name not on it was not searched for. The 2012 list was not reconciled with ICANN's official total. "Based" means the country the applicant declares, not that of its parent company.