MICROSOFT CHOOSES THE NUCLEAR OPTION

Software giant throws it weight behind experimental energy plan.

Microsoft has often made big, expensive bets on almost certainly doomed ideas. From challenging the almighty iPod with the Zune, to trying to muscle Windows Mobile into a market that had been reshaped by Apple and Android, the gambles don’t always pay off.

Now Microsoft has decided to pour money into perhaps the most historically doomed venture of all: fusion energy.

Fusion is, in essence, a highly speculative form of nuclear power. Unlike the power plants we have today based on nuclear fission – splitting the atom – the idea behind fusion is that it’s conceivably possible to capture the huge amounts of energy released when atoms fuse together.

There’s one major snag: so far, it hasn’t been proven to work. The long-running joke in the energy industry is that for the past several decades, fusion power has always been “30 years away”. It was only last year that scientists working on an experimental reactor finally managed to get out more energy than they put into a given fusion reaction, which perhaps illustrates how embryonic the technology is.

This doesn’t appear to have deterred Redmond, however, as the company has inked a new agreement with a startup called Helion to power its data centres with fusion energy, just as soon as they come online, hopefully in 2028.

More broadly, the move does appear to be in line with Microsoft’s broader corporate strategy. In 2020, the company announced its intentions to pursue an “aggressive” approach to becoming carbon negative by 2030 – with the goal to have removed enough CO2 from the atmosphere to account for operations over Microsoft’s entire lifetime by 2050.

But why fusion? And why Helion? The answer may have something to do with the fact that a major investor in the company is current tech darling Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, with whom Microsoft announced a US$10 billion partnership earlier this year.

Is Microsoft hoping that lightning will strike twice? “There is no doubt that fusion power will change the world, when we are able to generate it,” said Zion Lights, a nuclear energy advocate and activist. But she also thinks that perhaps instead of betting on something speculative, Microsoft and the rest of us could also look at what has already been invented instead.

“Humanity will always need more energy. The breakthroughs in fusion are promising and I’m hopeful that we’ll attain it in my lifetime… But for now, nuclear fission is the solution to many of our problems that we know works and can build right now.”