Oh, normal people know it’s 2026 because it says so on their calendars? Because they made New Year’s resolutions? Because they randomly picked up a new hobby like thematic gardening or began knitting every person they know a scarf?

Finance nerds like us know another year has passed because there’s shiny new economic data to unpack. Ahh, the sweet smell of CPI data.

The release of December’s consumer price data kicked off a busy week for economists. Consumer prices jumped 2.7% for the year, and 0.3% for the month, offering a closer look at inflation as the Federal Reserve prepares to meet again later in January.

Core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy prices, climbed 2.6% for the year, and 0.2% for the month.

“A lot of the macroeconomists are saying, well, core was a little lower than expectations, and the headline was maybe a little bit softer than expectations. So all in all, the inflation news was pretty good,” Jon Hilsenrath, a senior advisor to StoneX, a financial services company, told CFO Brew. “I’m more in the hawkish camp. I think that because of the government shutdown, they had to do a lot of imputation, which is holding these numbers down.”

Others economic experts, like Bernard Yaros, lead US economist at Oxford Economics, similarly expect it won’t “be until midyear that we start to really get a cleaner read,” per Morningstar.

Keep reading.—NP

Midsize businesses may have fewer resources than the corporate giants, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get more sophisticated through AI and automation.

In fact, roughly nine in 10 of the nearly 1,500 midsize business leaders (29% of whom were CFOs) who responded to a JPMorgan survey in November said they plan to use AI in 2026. The most popular areas for AI implementation were process automation (62%), predictive analytics (44%), and market intelligence (42%), according to the bank’s latest Business Leaders Outlook survey.

Similarly, nearly two-thirds of 200 CFOs and finance executives at US middle-market firms (those with between $5 million and $250 million in revenue) said their company is either “actively” automating processes or making operational changes “for future alignment,” according to Cherry Bekaert’s Middle Market CFO Survey published in November. In the report, the accounting firm contended that AI and automation “are no longer optional.”

Keep reading.—AZ

It’s no secret that the data centers powering the AI age are enormously expensive: Annual operating costs for each are estimated to be in the tens of millions, and just getting one off the ground costs billions.

But once a data center is built, maintenance costs can be significantly reduced by fueling a majority of operations via clean energy, employing energy and water efficiency technologies, and computing sustainably. And while there’s no one-size-fits-all definition of a “green data center,” those that have been able to cut emissions and costs tend to focus on these fundamental practices.

Using idle energy: There are lots of data centers that run in part on clean energy from solar farms and rooftop and community solar, all of which can lower power prices. But to supercharge those savings, data-center developers can couple unused renewable energy with the need for more computing power.

Even though the US is facing an energy demand crisis, a lot of renewable energy actually gets wasted. States like California and Texas get a higher percentage of energy from renewables like solar and wind—but because those sources of power flow mostly during the day when energy demand is lower, large swaths of clean energy don’t get used if it’s not stored in batteries. In an effort to absorb some of that energy that would otherwise go to waste, Soluna Holdings, a data center developer, locates solar and wind farms that produce more than can be consumed and builds data centers nearby.

“There’s a lot of power in the grid,” CEO John Belizaire told Morning Brew. “You’ve just got to look in the right place.”

Keep reading on Tech Brew.—TC

Private equity is reshaping accounting like never before. From mega roll-ups and skyrocketing valuations to bold PE-backed CPA deals and ESOP experiments, the industry is in flux. Explore how PE is transforming firm culture, governance, and the future of Main Street CPA—an accounting revolution you won’t want to miss.