The technology to decarbonise already exists — but projects still die in the permitting queue, the single biggest time-sink in the energy cycle. Microsoft’s Energy & Resources team shows how AI is compressing licensing timelines from years to months, and why that speed is what unlocks the SMR and fusion future.

• The real bottleneck isn’t tech — it’s paperwork: Aalo Atomics cut its permitting time by 92% using Microsoft’s AI, saving an estimated $80m a year.
• How it works: agentic AI drafts, reviews and pre-checks licensing documents against the full regulatory dataset before they reach a regulator, collapsing months of back-and-forth.
• The bigger bet — SMRs and fusion: Microsoft signed the world’s first fusion PPA (50 MW from Helion, targeting 2028) alongside SMR and fission deals. Is fusion a real 2030s option, or still a moonshot?