Aruba S.p.A. pulled off one of the more surprising wins in domain history back in 2012, outbidding Amazon and Google for the rights to run .cloud. That single domain now carries over 500,000 registrations. Apparently, that win didn’t satisfy the company, because it just applied for 39 new top level domain strings in this year’s expansion round, and it’s about to fight for a good chunk of them at auction.
The Italian company, better known at home than internationally, told Domain Name Wire it’s deliberately moving past its IT-focused roots this time. Francesco Simondi, Aruba’s Head of Registry Services, described the strategy as building a portfolio that speaks to different audiences rather than sticking to one lane. That shows in the actual list: alongside expected tech-adjacent strings like .vps and .lab sit everyday words like .ciao, .hello, .hola, .happy and .yes, plus a scattering of odder picks like .mars, .moon, .zzz and .omg.
The strategy reveals something about where Aruba thinks domain demand is heading. A .cloud win in 2012 made sense for a company built around infrastructure and hosting. Applying for .ciao, .roma and .sito in 2026 suggests Aruba is betting registrars and everyday users want domains that feel local, conversational or brandable, not just technical.
That bet comes with a catch, though. Many of Aruba’s 39 applications overlap with strings other companies applied for too, which means the road to actually running these domains runs through contention sets and private auctions, the exact process that made Aruba’s name in the industry to begin with. Winning .cloud against Amazon and Google was already an upset. Doing it again across a dozen or more contested strings, against competitors who’ve presumably learned from watching Aruba win once, is a different kind of challenge.
Whether Aruba can repeat its 2012 performance across this many contested strings at once remains genuinely unclear. What’s clear is that the company isn’t treating its .cloud win as a one-time success story. It’s treating it as a playbook, and it’s about to test whether that playbook still works when everyone else in the room has seen it run before.
