New Listings: A New ETF Has Legally Defined What Counts as an AI Company, in Four Parts

Somewhere at a fund manufacturer, a lawyer and a portfolio manager sat down together and produced something that reads less like an investment strategy and more like a statute, complete with subclauses.

Defiance AI Hyperscale Leaders ETF (AIHY, NYSE Arca)

Most thematic funds tell you roughly what they own and let you take it on faith. This one comes with a legal test. To qualify as an "AI Hyperscale Leader," a company must satisfy four separate criteria, labelled A through D, each with its own subclauses. Part A alone offers three different ways to pass: derive at least half your revenue from AI infrastructure, or allocate at least half your capital expenditure to it, or spend at least half your R&D budget on it.Then you also need positive revenue growth that outpaces expense growth, positive year-over-year revenue growth in general, and a positive gross margin.

It is, in fairness, a more rigorous framework than "put the word AI in the name and see what happens." The fund is brand new with no operating history, will hold somewhere between five and fifty companies, and reserves the right to get its exposure indirectly through options, swaps, and futures rather than owning the shares outright. So the actual portfolio may end up being a derivatives book that references a legal definition. I find this oddly appropriate for AI.

Fidelity Global High Yield Corporate Bond Paris-Aligned Benchmark ETF (FHYI, London Stock Exchange)

High yield bonds exist because some companies are a genuine credit risk. That is the entire product category. You are being paid extra yield precisely because the issuer might not be around to pay you back.

This fund takes that universe of companies and asks it to commit to cutting its weighted average carbon intensity by half immediately, then by a further seven percent every year after that, on a glide path aimed at a climate target that sits decades out. There is something almost touching about demanding a multi-decade decarbonisation commitment from a category of borrower whose defining characteristic is that nobody is entirely sure they will make next year's coupon payment. It is classified as one of the more rigorous sustainability categories under European rules, which only makes the mismatch more interesting.

Amundi Global Data Center ETF (DATAC, Euronext Paris)

And then, tucked in among all that, a fund that simply does the obvious thing. Data centre capital spending tied to the AI build-out is heading toward the hundreds of billions annually, a rival issuer already runs a well-established fund tracking the same real estate and digital infrastructure niche, and Amundi has now quietly joined it. No four-part legal test. No decade-spanning carbon pledge. Just a straightforward wrapper around the physical plumbing that AI actually runs on.