House lawmakers entered the final 48 hours before a make-or-break committee vote on a sweeping artificial intelligence moratorium Monday, with sponsors and opponents alike acknowledging that the measure’s fate in the Ways and Means Committee remained too close to call.

The bill, which passed the Senate 52-48 on April 7, would impose a two-year pause on the construction of new frontier AI training clusters above a specified compute threshold, tighten energy-use disclosure requirements, and direct the Treasury to study a windfall tax on hyperscaler profits attributable to generative models. Committee leaders have scheduled Wednesday’s vote for 10 a.m., and aides on both sides said neither camp had reached a confident majority of the panel’s 45 members.

“We are at twenty-one solid yes votes and chasing two more,” said a Democratic staffer involved in the whip operation, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “The other side is doing the same math. Whoever locks in the last vote tomorrow wins this.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, the bill’s lead sponsor in the upper chamber, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has spearheaded House outreach, spent Monday in back-to-back meetings with moderate Democrats from districts that host major data center construction projects. Both have argued that the measure does not halt AI research but only the rapid build-out of energy-intensive training infrastructure, which they say has strained regional grids and driven up consumer electricity prices.

“This is not a ban. It is a timeout while we figure out what guardrails the country actually needs,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters outside the Longworth building Monday afternoon. “Every member of this committee is going to have to explain their vote to constituents whose power bills went up forty percent last year.”

Opponents have countered that the bill arrives at the worst possible moment, with markets only beginning to stabilize after the Iran ceasefire and tech earnings season already underway. A coalition letter circulated Monday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Information Technology Industry Council, and a group of regional utility associations warned that a moratorium would “freeze tens of billions of dollars in announced capital expenditure and hand the global compute lead to Beijing.”

Chief executives from at least four hyperscale firms were spotted on Capitol Hill last week, and multiple staffers said industry lobbyists had targeted three Democrats in particular: Representatives serving districts in Virginia’s data-center corridor, central Ohio, and the Phoenix metropolitan area, where utility commissions have approved a wave of new gas-fired generation tied to AI demand.

“The energy concern is real and I want it addressed,” said Representative Hollis Granger, a moderate Democrat from a suburban Virginia district who has not yet declared a position. “But a two-year moratorium written this broadly is a blunt instrument. I’m still reading the substitute language the chairman circulated this morning.”

That substitute language, drafted by Ways and Means Chairman Marcus Cobb, would narrow the moratorium to facilities exceeding a higher compute threshold and exempt projects that have already broken ground. Sanders’s office criticized the revisions as “industry-written” in a Sunday statement, while several committee Democrats described them as a possible landing zone.

The White House has so far declined to take a public position. Press Secretary Caroline Levitt, asked Monday whether President Donald Trump would sign the bill if it reached his desk, said only that the administration was “monitoring the legislative process closely” and that the president believed in “American AI dominance, full stop.” Two administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said internal deliberations remained divided between economic advisers wary of disrupting capital markets and political aides who view the energy-cost argument as resonant with the president’s working-class base.

Republican members of Ways and Means are expected to vote against the bill almost uniformly, with the exception of Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who voted with Sanders on a related amendment last year and has signaled openness to the moratorium’s energy provisions. Committee aides said the GOP whip operation viewed her as the only realistic defector and had assigned a senior member to keep her in the fold.

Outside the Capitol, advocacy groups intensified pressure on both sides. The Center for AI Safety, which has endorsed the moratorium, ran six-figure digital ad buys in five committee districts over the weekend. A coalition of construction trade unions, which has historically aligned with Democrats but stands to lose work if data center projects pause, mobilized members for in-district visits.

The political backdrop has been complicated by the recent Iran ceasefire, which has dominated public attention and shifted oxygen away from domestic priorities. Several Democratic strategists privately worried that the moratorium debate had not broken through with voters in the way sponsors hoped when the bill was introduced in late March.

“Three weeks ago this was the biggest fight in Washington,” said Devin Marsh, a Democratic consultant who advises House campaigns. “Today it’s competing with prisoner exchanges in Doha and oil at ninety-five dollars. That works in industry’s favor.”

If the committee approves the bill Wednesday, House leadership would face a difficult scheduling choice with floor time tight before the Memorial Day recess. A defeat, by contrast, would likely end the moratorium’s prospects in the current Congress, though Sanders has said he would press for a stand-alone vote and pursue state-level legislation in New York and California regardless of the outcome.

Committee aides said the chairman’s office would release a final markup schedule by Tuesday evening, and that additional substitute amendments could surface in the hours before the vote.