The House Energy and Commerce Committee opened a daylong hearing Friday on the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez moratorium on large artificial intelligence data center construction, with members from both parties offering a more skeptical reception of the cloud industry’s grid-investment pledge than executives had heard in the Senate two days earlier and exposing sharp regional divisions inside the Democratic caucus.

The hearing, convened by committee chairman Brett Guthrie, Republican of Kentucky, drew testimony from utility chief executives, two regional grid operators, an Environmental Protection Agency career official and representatives of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and a coalition of mid-sized colocation providers. Members spent roughly six hours questioning witnesses about whether the $42 billion in transmission and small modular reactor commitments unveiled Monday by hyperscaler chief executives would arrive on timelines that meaningfully addressed the load growth their own contracts were generating.

“You are pledging investments that depend on permitting reform you do not control, on nuclear designs that have not received commercial licensure, and on transmission rights of way that take a decade to clear,” said Representative Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey and the committee’s ranking member, addressing Microsoft’s senior vice president for energy strategy, Lillian Voss. “Why should this committee accept a future-tense answer to a present-tense problem?”

Voss responded that Microsoft had already executed binding term sheets with two utilities for behind-the-meter natural gas generation and was prepared to publish a quarterly accounting of progress against the coalition’s pledged spending. “We understand the burden of proof has shifted to us,” she said. “We accept that burden.”

The committee’s makeup made the politics of the hearing distinct from Tuesday’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources session. Five Democratic members of Energy and Commerce represent districts with significant data center investment in Northern Virginia, central Ohio, suburban Atlanta or the Phoenix corridor, and three of those members made clear over the course of the morning that they would not vote for a clean moratorium. Representative Suhas Subramanyam, Democrat of Virginia, whose district includes much of Loudoun County, said the bill in its current form was “a sledgehammer at a problem that calls for a scalpel” and pressed witnesses on whether a tiered megawatt threshold could distinguish between expansion of existing campuses and the construction of new ones.

That position drew a sharp public response from a separate bloc of Democrats whose constituents have seen residential electricity rates rise meaningfully over the past year. Representative Doris Matsui, Democrat of California, said utility customers in her Sacramento-area district had absorbed two rate cases in 18 months partly tied to transmission upgrades the state’s investor-owned utilities had attributed to data center load growth. “If a working family in Elk Grove pays more so that a foundation model can be trained on a tighter timeline, that is not a market outcome any of us should defend,” Matsui said.

The split is the most visible Democratic fracture on the bill since its introduction last week and is likely to shape House passage prospects even if the Senate clears the legislation. Committee aides on both sides said amendment drafts circulated overnight included a “regional flexibility” mechanism that would allow the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to grant time-limited waivers in interconnection regions where utilities certified adequate near-term capacity, a concept that Subramanyam and several other data center state Democrats had pressed for.

Republicans on the committee divided along different lines. Chairman Guthrie used his opening statement to characterize the bill as “a Sanders-AOC bill in search of a problem the market is already solving,” but several Republican members from states with high industrial electricity costs questioned hyperscaler witnesses pointedly about water consumption at training campuses and about the proportion of their generation pledge that would be sited in the same states absorbing the load. Representative Bill Johnson, Republican of Ohio, asked Amazon Web Services energy policy director Calvin Trent whether the company’s Columbus-area expansion would commit to purchasing power from in-state generation, and pressed Trent for a yes-or-no answer before yielding back his time without receiving one.

Witnesses from the grid side offered a more clinical picture. James Roper, chief operating officer of PJM Interconnection, told the committee that the regional transmission organization’s most recent capacity auction had cleared at prices roughly four times higher than two years earlier, and that data center interconnection requests in PJM’s queue now totaled more than 80 gigawatts, more than the entire installed capacity of several mid-sized states. “We do not take a position on the policy question before this committee,” Roper said. “We take the position that the math as currently constructed does not work without either a substantial expansion of transmission or a substantial moderation of new load.”

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas chief executive, Patricia Lanier, offered a parallel account for the Texas grid and noted that ERCOT had begun requiring large flexible loads, a category that includes most hyperscaler campuses, to register operational flexibility commitments as a condition of interconnection. “We are using every tool we have,” Lanier said. “We do not believe we have enough tools.”

Environmental and consumer witnesses pressed members to focus on water as well as electricity. Yara Castellanos, policy director at the Western Resource Advocates, told the committee that direct evaporative cooling at several of the largest training campuses in Arizona and New Mexico was consuming volumes of water that, on a per-megawatt basis, exceeded the consumption of comparable industrial facilities by significant margins. The hyperscaler witnesses pushed back on the comparison, arguing that newer campuses were transitioning to closed-loop liquid cooling and that the industry’s aggregate water footprint, while real, was small relative to agricultural use.

Outside the committee room, lobbying continued at a pace several Hill veterans described as without recent parallel. The American AI Coalition, the trade group formed Monday to coordinate the industry’s response to the bill, opened a temporary office two blocks from the Capitol and circulated a revised counterproposal that added a binding pre-deployment safety evaluation regime at the National Institute of Standards and Technology to its earlier energy commitments. Carolyn Beck, a longtime tech-policy strategist now advising the coalition, said the addition reflected acknowledgments members had received from Senate moderates that an energy-only response would not be sufficient.

Sanders, asked by reporters Friday afternoon whether the revised counteroffer changed his assessment, said it did not. “Every week these companies discover a new concession they had been hiding,” the senator said. “The simplest test is whether they will accept any binding constraint on the rate at which they build. So far, they will not.”

A markup of the Senate version of the bill was scheduled for Tuesday morning, with a floor vote expected later in the week. House leadership has not committed to a timeline, and aides to Speaker Mike Johnson said no decision on floor consideration would be made before the Senate completed its work. Committee staff said additional amendments, including a possible carve-out for academic research clusters below a defined threshold, would be circulated over the weekend ahead of next week’s continued proceedings.