The chief executives of the four largest U.S. cloud providers spent Monday cycling through House offices in a last-stretch push against the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez artificial intelligence training moratorium, as the bill heads toward a Ways and Means vote that committee aides now expect midweek.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon Web Services chief Adam Selipsky and Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia each held private meetings with members of the panel and with a small group of moderate House Democrats whose votes are seen as decisive. A joint statement issued Monday afternoon by their trade group, the American Cloud and AI Coalition, warned that the bill, which would freeze new training runs above a defined compute threshold for 18 months, would “stall a generation of American innovation at the moment competitors abroad are racing to overtake us.”

The legislation passed the Senate 52-48 on April 7, with three Republicans and two independents joining most Democrats, and five Democrats voting against. Its fate in the House has been less certain from the start, and the Ways and Means Committee — which gained jurisdiction over a contested revenue offset attached to the bill — is now the chokepoint.

“This is the most aggressive fly-in we’ve seen on a tech bill since the antitrust package,” said Megan Holcomb, a longtime tech lobbyist with the Washington firm Brunswick Strategies. “They’re not pretending it’s a friendly conversation anymore. The companies have decided the cost of losing is bigger than the cost of looking pushy.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, one of the moderate Democrats targeted in Monday’s meetings, told reporters outside the Longworth building that he remained “open but skeptical” of the moratorium’s design. “I share the senators’ concerns about energy load and labor displacement,” Torres said. “I am not yet convinced an 18-month freeze is the instrument that solves them.” Several other House Democrats — including Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Susie Lee of Nevada — have similarly declined to commit.

Backers of the bill spent the day mounting a counter-push. Sen. Bernie Sanders held a 45-minute closed-door session with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led a midafternoon press conference on the Capitol steps flanked by representatives of the Communications Workers of America and the Sierra Club. “Every week we delay, another data center the size of a small city gets approved on a grid that cannot carry it,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The CEOs walking these halls today are not asking for time. They are asking for a permission slip.”

Aides to Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., said the panel would meet Tuesday morning for member statements, with the formal markup and vote possible as soon as Wednesday afternoon. The committee’s 24 Republicans are expected to vote unanimously against. That leaves the bill’s fate to the 21 Democrats on the panel, two of whom — Reps. Brad Schneider of Illinois and Brian Higgins of New York — have not publicly committed.

The moratorium would apply to any new training run consuming more than 10^26 floating-point operations on U.S.-based infrastructure, and would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop a licensing regime during the freeze. The Senate version added a carve-out for medical, climate and defense workloads after lobbying from a coalition of academic medical centers and the Department of Energy national labs.

Industry estimates of the bill’s cost vary widely. A study released Monday by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that receives industry funding, projected $148 billion in lost domestic AI capital expenditure over the moratorium window. A countering analysis by the Roosevelt Institute, circulated to House Democratic offices the same morning, argued that the freeze would redirect roughly $90 billion into grid upgrades, efficiency research and workforce programs, with negligible net effect on national AI competitiveness.

Tucked inside the bill is a one-time excise on data-center power draw above a set threshold, projected to raise about $14 billion over a decade. That provision is what pulled the bill into Ways and Means jurisdiction in the first place, and it has become an independent flashpoint. Utility executives from PJM and ERCOT territories have warned in private briefings that the excise, layered atop existing capacity charges, could complicate financing for interconnection queues already stretched to 2030.

The lobbying push has spilled outside Washington. State-level moratorium bills introduced last week in Albany and Sacramento drew industry counter-campaigns of their own on Monday. New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said his chamber would hold hearings in May regardless of the federal outcome. California’s measure, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, is scheduled for a Senate Energy committee hearing on April 28.

Privately, two senior staffers on the House panel said they expected the federal bill to fail narrowly in committee, with Republicans joined by three or four Democrats. “The energy argument is landing. The freeze mechanism is not,” one aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss vote counts. A second staffer said leadership had not foreclosed the possibility of a discharge petition if the bill died in committee, though that path was viewed internally as unlikely to succeed before the August recess.

The four CEOs were scheduled to remain in Washington through Tuesday morning before returning to their respective headquarters. Committee staff said additional witness statements would be entered into the record before any vote.