AI is transforming industries, but the data centers powering it require more energy and water than ever.

At the break, join Christoph Beck, chairman and CEO of EcoLab, for insights on using water effectively while safeguarding this critical resource for future generations.

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, January 9th.

I'm Patrick Coffey for the Wall Street Journal.

When Meta launched Reels on Instagram in 2020, it seemed like little more than a TikTok copycat,

and it didn't generate any revenue.

Now it's set to bring in as much as Coca-Cola and Nike, and it's got plans to get even bigger.

We're diving into how Reels became a $50 billion business and where it's heading next.

Then, AI has a questionable reputation in the legal world, where there have been headlines about lawyers submitting briefs with errors and even cases that were entirely made up.

But it's not just lawyers.

Increasingly, it's being used by judges.

We look at how the tech is being used today and ask,

are chatbot judges next?

But first, meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a recent earnings call that Reels had

surpassed a $50 billion run rate, meaning it's on track to make that amount of revenue in the

next 12 months and become a bigger source of ad sales than YouTube.

Journal reporter Megan Bobrowski tells us how Meta created a solid business from a platform that many initially dismissed as a TikTok wannabe.

To start with the TLDR question, how did Reels become such a big business?

It took them a while. It took them five years to reach this point. I spoke with an Instagram executive, and she told me that they had to

reconfigure the algorithm from scratch to make this work. Instagram used to be a place where you would

go to see content from your friends and your family and people you follow pretty much exclusively,

and this Instagram executive told me that they had to figure out a way

...