Top executives from Microsoft, Google, Meta and a half-dozen smaller artificial-intelligence firms shifted their lobbying push directly into House offices this week, racing to peel away wavering Democrats before the Ways and Means Committee takes up the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez AI training moratorium, currently expected to reach a vote on April 22.

The push marks the most concentrated industry presence on Capitol Hill since the bill passed the Senate on April 7 by a 52-48 margin. Lobbying disclosure filings reviewed by congressional staff show at least 41 separate meetings between hyperscaler executives and House members or senior aides since Friday, with another 30 scheduled before the committee markup.

“The next eight days are the entire game,” said Margaret Hsieh, a technology policy consultant at the Beacon Hill Group who is tracking the bill’s progress. “If the industry can move three or four members on Ways and Means, the bill dies in committee. If it can’t, it advances to the floor with momentum no one in this town expected six weeks ago.”

The legislation, introduced March 26 by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., would impose an 18-month freeze on the training of frontier AI models above a defined compute threshold, paired with a temporary cap on new hyperscale data-center construction in jurisdictions where grid reliability authorities have flagged capacity stress. Supporters argue the moratorium would give regulators, utilities and labor markets time to adjust to what the bill’s authors call “the most rapid industrial transformation in modern American history.” Opponents call it a de facto ban on the country’s most competitive technology sector.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella met Monday with House Speaker Mike Johnson and separately with a group of moderate House Democrats organized by Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, according to two people familiar with the meetings who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. Google’s Sundar Pichai held a closed-door session with the New Democrat Coalition on Tuesday morning. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to address the same group Thursday.

A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the administration has not committed to a veto position. President Donald Trump told reporters Friday that the bill “has some problems” but declined to say whether he would sign it if it reached his desk, and his aides have privately signaled that the White House is waiting to see whether the House version survives committee before staking out a public stance.

Industry’s central argument has narrowed in recent days. Rather than defending the pace of model development on its own terms, executives have leaned heavily on the national-security implications of an American training freeze while Chinese firms continue unimpeded.

“A pause in the United States is not a pause globally,” said David Chen, senior vice president for policy at the Information Technology Industry Council, in a statement Monday. “It is a transfer. Every month of moratorium here is a month of compounding advantage for systems trained under jurisdictions that do not share our safety norms.”

That framing has gained traction with some House Democrats who voted against earlier industry-friendly bills. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the minority leader, has declined to whip the caucus in either direction, leaving members to take their own positions — a posture that has frustrated bill sponsors. AOC, asked Tuesday whether she expected leadership support, said the caucus would “decide for itself what it believes about an industry consuming as much electricity next year as Argentina.”

Bill backers have continued their own organizing. The Communications Workers of America, the AFL-CIO and a coalition of environmental groups led by the Sierra Club have run targeted advertising in 14 swing districts since Wednesday. The American Federation of Teachers added its endorsement Monday, citing concerns about classroom impact. Internal vote counts circulated by progressive staff put the current Ways and Means split at 22 votes against the bill, 19 in favor, with two members publicly undecided and one — Rep. Bradley Schneider, D-Ill. — described by multiple sources as the pivotal swing.

Schneider’s office declined to comment on his position. In a brief exchange with reporters Tuesday, he said only that he was “still reading the energy provisions carefully.”

The energy provisions have emerged as the bill’s most politically durable feature. A joint report released Friday by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Department of Energy projected that data-center load growth would account for roughly 9 percent of total U.S. electricity demand by 2028, up from less than 3 percent in 2023, with concentrated stress in Virginia, Texas, Arizona and parts of the Pacific Northwest. The report did not endorse a moratorium but characterized the construction pace as “outpacing current grid planning cycles in multiple regions.”

Industry pushback on the energy framing has been uneven. Several smaller AI firms, including two backed by Andreessen Horowitz, have publicly broken from the larger hyperscalers’ messaging, arguing that a compute threshold set high enough to capture only frontier model training would leave most of the sector untouched and could be a workable compromise. Larger companies have so far resisted that framing.

A second White House official said staff-level meetings with House leadership are scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday to discuss potential amendments that could be offered at markup. Whether the administration ultimately weighs in publicly before the vote, the official said, “depends on what the count looks like Monday morning.”

Committee Chair Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., has not yet released a final markup schedule but told reporters Tuesday that he intended to bring the bill to a vote next week regardless of where the count stood. Lobbyists on both sides said they expected the closest committee margin on a major technology bill in at least a decade.