These are very long term bets. MS isn't betting much here, just staying involved just in case. Which is prudent but not much of a commitment. A big commitment for a trillion dollar company would have a big dollar value. Like billions of dollars. That's not what's happening here.

I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress.

In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove.

I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic.

In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.