at the point you're worrying about paying creditors off with your IP, you're... bust.

Microsoft would have a claim as a creditor. It's more than nothing, but it is a paper promise.

What’s an IP in this context please ?

It's like taking an idea hostage. If you fail to pull it off, you make sure that nobody else has the chance to try it without first paying you for that privilege. It's supposed to help somehow.

Bookmarked.

Intellectual Property - so there might be trade secrets, patents, etc developed in the course of research. Even if the business goes bust, they might have learned valuable lessons.

Intellectual property. Patents, primarily, but also internal know-how and private research.

this is needlessly cynical, no?

It is very needlessly cynical. Helion has a number of very clever ideas, integrated in a way that has impressed me over the years. I would not dismiss them out of hand.

If they are really only 5 years from producing sellable power they are already capable of a science demo that would render this sort of vapid publicity stunt pointless. I’ve set a reminder to check back in 5 years, if the cynicism was genuinely needless I’ll apologize.

I suggest you do a deep dive into the physics behind their design. It's quite clever. They are able to evade some of the practical showstopping issues that face most other fusion approaches.

This announcement has nothing to do with physics. As stated, it's just an agreement for Microsoft to buy electricity, and not obviously an agreement to do so at any particular price. And why make this move now? Is Helion afraid that no one would buy their electricity? It's literally the most fungible commodity ever and we're heading into an era of unprecedented demand for charging EVs. Anyone offering reliable, environmentally friendly in 2028 will have no problem selling all they can produce. And why pick a specific customer at all? That's a weird way to sell bulk electricity, which is distributed by grids that cover millions of consumers. I could see Microsoft needing to make such an agreement before Constellation might be willing to finance new transmission from the grid to a remote Azure data center, but nothing in this announcement suggests that's the case. The only plausible explanation for this move is financial--Helion is going to leverage Microsoft's name to lure investment--and/or some sort of carbon credit/greenwashing play by Constellation & Microsoft.

So, you wanted to form an opinion on them without looking at the physics? Really?

Your complaining there just looks like frantic unhinged negativism.