SACRAMENTO — California’s data-center moratorium bill cleared the state Senate energy, utilities and communications committee on a 9-4 vote Wednesday after author Sen. Maria Elena Durazo amended the measure to narrow its scope to facilities above 200 megawatts and to grandfather projects with interconnection agreements signed with the state’s investor-owned utilities before April 1.

The amendments, negotiated over the preceding two weeks with the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, with utility-side stakeholders, and with several Bay Area municipal interests, drop the bill’s previous applicability threshold from 50 megawatts and limit the moratorium’s duration to twenty-four months, with an automatic sunset provision tied to the completion of a Public Utilities Commission proceeding on data-center grid impact. The earlier version of the bill had imposed an indefinite freeze with a legislative-action lift requirement.

Durazo, who chairs the energy committee and represents a Los Angeles district that has been the site of several large-scale data-center proposals, described the amendments in her opening remarks as “a recognition that good policy needs to acknowledge the projects that are already in motion.” She added that the narrowed threshold reflected “the recognition that this is fundamentally a hyperscaler-class problem, not a colocation-center problem.”

The amended bill is now scheduled to be heard by the Senate appropriations committee on May 20, with a Senate floor vote expected in the first week of June if it clears appropriations. The Assembly’s environment committee has indicated it will take up a companion measure, AB-1842, in the first week of June.

The vote came less than a week after Anthropic launched its Claude Helios frontier model under the new voluntary disclosure framework the five largest U.S. AI developers had signed on May 8, and on the same day as the first signs of internal disagreement among the framework’s signatories on the practicality of routine disclosure of training cluster grid impact. The Anthropic submission, several committee staff said in conversations Wednesday, had eased some concerns about the technical feasibility of disclosure but had not addressed the more fundamental questions about siting, water and grid capacity that the bill is intended to handle.

The data-center moratorium has been the most contested piece of state-level AI infrastructure legislation in the country since California’s SB-1047 last year. Industry associations have lobbied hard against the measure, arguing that a California moratorium — even a narrowed one — would push the next wave of hyperscaler buildout to neighboring states and accelerate the trend, already visible in 2024 and 2025, of large training clusters being sited in Texas, Arizona and increasingly the Mountain West.

“The data does not support the proposition that this bill will protect Californians,” said Steve DelBianco, president of the trade group NetChoice, in testimony delivered Wednesday morning. “It will simply move the same buildout to Phoenix and to Reno. It will do that while California gives up the tax revenue, the construction jobs and the procurement spend that comes with each facility.”

Proponents of the bill, including a coalition of consumer and environmental groups, have countered that the question is not where data centers are built but on what terms. “The Texas and Arizona buildouts have proceeded without disclosure, without ratepayer protection and without binding water-use commitments,” said Ann Mavros, director of energy policy at the Sierra Club’s California chapter. “California has the leverage to set those terms. Whether that buildout shifts is, frankly, a secondary question to whether it shifts on better terms.”

The 200-megawatt threshold in the amended bill — equivalent to roughly the load of a midsized university campus — was a key piece of the negotiation. Several Silicon Valley municipalities had argued that the earlier 50-megawatt threshold would have applied to a meaningful number of enterprise and colocation facilities that local economies and tax bases depend on. The new threshold limits the bill’s bite to the largest hyperscaler-class facilities, of which roughly nine projects are currently under development across the state and a further six are in the early pre-application phase.

Several major hyperscalers, asked about the amendments, declined to comment publicly but indicated through trade associations that the narrower framing was preferable to the original bill’s structure. A senior official at one of the four companies that have committed to siting next-generation training facilities in California, contacted Wednesday afternoon, said the amended bill would “delay rather than redirect” the company’s California buildout, and indicated that the firm would now wait to see the shape of the PUC proceeding before reassessing.

The Public Utilities Commission proceeding that the bill is structured around — a comprehensive examination of data-center load forecasting, ratepayer impact, and grid interconnection timing — was opened in February and is currently in its initial scoping phase. Commission staff have indicated that a preliminary scoping memo will be issued by the end of June, with formal hearings expected in the autumn.

The federal context has tightened in parallel. The bipartisan AI Transparency and Grid Impact Act introduced last week by Sens. Maggie Hennessey, D-Colo., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., would impose federal disclosure requirements on training facilities above a defined size threshold, including grid-impact attestations and a quarterly reporting obligation. The Treasury Department, separately, is expected to publish proposed rulemaking later this week on the application of existing Federal Power Act provisions to large hyperscaler interconnections — a draft seen by analysts who attended a Wednesday morning briefing.

Several Sacramento observers said the California bill’s path would likely be determined by whether the federal track produces meaningful disclosure obligations in the coming months. “If the Treasury rules land, and if Hennessey-Blackburn moves, the California bill becomes less of a unique source of leverage and more of a complement,” said a senior policy adviser at the Bay Area Council. “If they do not land, Sacramento will move ahead.”

Durazo, asked whether she expected the bill to reach the governor’s desk before the end of session, said only that “the work between now and June is the work that matters.” Newsom has not publicly committed on the measure, but his office’s involvement in the amendment process has been read by both sides as evidence that the governor is preparing to sign a narrowed version if it reaches him.