Direct Air Capture is slow, but I think is a better solution than the "don't cut down trees" offset that we've historically seen. I hope that continued investment in DAC leads to new solutions to make it more effective.
You have to start somewhere! This is a major public corporation that is making a significant investment with the goal of being carbon negative (!) by 2030. Imagine if every large corporation (and then, every corporation) made similar investments to become carbon neutral or negative.
Everything big started small, and I for one am super pumped that Microsoft is doing this. It's genuine leadership on the most pressing issue that humanity faces.
The problem is that this is a physical process that’s extremely hard to scale. If I recall correctly CO2 recapture uses more energy than we got from releasing it. Now think about how much energy we burn as a species and how we’re not only supposed to offset that with fully green tech but then also expand that green tech to generate so much electricity that we can recapture carbon.
Fission is really the only solution but even that is enormously expensive.
A good first step would be to realize that we need to consume less, and that technology will not save us: we have to change society in order to consume a lot less. Doesn't mean there are no interesting engineering problems there!
Edit: it's direct air capture, it's not some shell game "offset" thing which is what I assumed, that's actually very interesting.