SACRAMENTO — A California Senate committee voted Thursday to advance a narrowed version of the AI training moratorium that collapsed in the U.S. House last week, shifting the regulatory fight from Washington to Sacramento and Albany and reopening a debate the industry had hoped was settled.

The Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee approved SB 1487, the California Responsible AI Compute Act, by a vote of 9-4. The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Mariana Ortega, D-Oakland, would impose an 18-month moratorium on the construction of new AI training data centers above 200 megawatts of contracted load, and would require existing hyperscale facilities to file quarterly water and grid-impact disclosures with the California Energy Commission.

The measure is markedly tighter in scope than the federal bill championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which passed the Senate 52-48 on April 7 before dying in the House Ways and Means Committee on April 22 by a vote of 24-21. Where the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez bill targeted training runs above a defined floating-point threshold, the California version focuses squarely on the physical footprint — power draw, water consumption and siting — of the data centers that host them.

“We are not trying to relitigate what Congress decided,” Ortega said in a brief statement outside the hearing room. “We are saying that California’s grid, California’s water table and California’s ratepayers have a right to know what is being built on top of them, and the right to a pause while we figure out how to plan for it.”

The committee vote came one day after a similar bill cleared its first hurdle in the New York State Assembly, where Assembly Member Devon Pierce, D-Brooklyn, introduced legislation that would freeze new training cluster permits in the state for two years. Connecticut and Oregon lawmakers have circulated draft language modeled on the Ortega bill, according to staff aides in each statehouse.

Industry groups, which spent the spring lobbying heavily against the federal measure, signaled they would mount a comparable campaign against the state efforts. The Cloud Infrastructure Council, a trade group whose members include the largest U.S. hyperscalers, said in a written statement that the California bill “substitutes a national debate that ended on the merits with a patchwork of contradictory state mandates.”

“Compute capacity is the foundation of every productivity gain the U.S. economy is counting on this decade,” said Trevor Halloran, the council’s executive director. “Stopping construction in the state that hosts a third of our nation’s training capacity is not a pause. It is a redirection to other jurisdictions, including foreign ones.”

But the energy argument that helped sink the federal bill in the House — that the broad moratorium would cost grid investment and high-wage construction jobs — has cut differently at the state level. California’s grid operator reported in March that contracted data-center load in the state had grown 41 percent year over year, and that three of the five largest interconnection requests now pending exceed 500 megawatts each. Utility regulators have warned that absent new transmission, the queue cannot clear before 2029.

“What we heard in Washington was that the federal moratorium was a blunt instrument,” said Daniela Choi, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies infrastructure policy. “What states like California and New York are doing is picking up the parts of that argument that were never really rebutted — the grid and water parts — and writing legislation that is narrow enough to be defensible in court.”

Choi noted that the Ortega bill includes a carve-out for facilities under 200 megawatts and for projects that pair with new on-site clean generation, language she described as “an olive branch to the buildout faction.”

Several large operators have already adjusted plans in anticipation of state action. A spokesperson for one major hyperscaler, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the company had paused two siting decisions in the Central Valley pending the bill’s progress and was accelerating reviews of sites in Texas, Wyoming and Quebec. Two other operators have publicly disclosed expanded commitments in Virginia and Ohio in the past ten days.

The bill’s advance also revives a political dynamic that briefly faded after the House vote. Sanders, in a statement Thursday evening, praised the California committee and said the federal effort “was never the end of the conversation.” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters in Queens that she had spoken with Ortega and Pierce in recent days and would campaign for state versions in any jurisdiction that requested it.

The Trump administration has remained publicly neutral on the state efforts, though Commerce Secretary Lila Hartwell, asked about the California bill at an unrelated event in Detroit, said the administration “supports states’ rights to regulate land use” but would “watch closely for any measure that functionally cuts off American compute capacity.”

Wall Street’s reaction was muted. Shares of the largest data-center real estate investment trusts slipped between 1.1 and 2.4 percent in after-hours trading, while the Nasdaq Composite closed up 0.6 percent on the day, lifted by post-ceasefire optimism and strong April-quarter results from two megacap software firms.

The Ortega bill now moves to the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is expected to take it up the week of May 11. If passed there, it would face a floor vote before the legislature’s June recess. A companion measure in the Assembly has not yet been scheduled for a hearing, though Speaker Robert Tan’s office said Thursday that “the timeline is being actively discussed.”

State officials said additional guidance on disclosure requirements would be issued by the California Energy Commission within 60 days of any enactment.