Eight days after a federal moratorium on large-scale artificial intelligence training collapsed in the House Ways and Means Committee, the country’s three largest cloud computing providers on Wednesday detailed plans to spend a combined $84 billion on new data center capacity through the end of next year, signaling that the industry intends to press ahead with its build-out even as state legislatures move to impose their own restrictions.

The announcements, staggered across investor calls and a joint industry briefing in San Jose, arrived as lawmakers in New York and California advanced bills that would cap power draw at new training facilities and require disclosure of model training compute above defined thresholds. Industry executives framed the federal defeat of the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez measure as a vindication of voluntary commitments, while acknowledging that the patchwork emerging at the state level could prove more disruptive than a single national rule.

“We have an obligation to keep building, and we have an obligation to do it responsibly,” said Priya Venkataraman, chief infrastructure officer at one of the three providers, during the San Jose briefing. “The conversation has moved on from whether to build. It is now about where, how fast, and on what grid.”

The largest of the announced projects, a 1.4-gigawatt campus to be developed in two phases across rural Mississippi and Louisiana, would be among the most power-intensive computing sites ever constructed in the United States. A second provider confirmed a previously rumored Wyoming expansion tied directly to a new natural gas plant being co-financed with a regional utility, an arrangement that has drawn scrutiny from environmental groups but cleared state regulatory review last week.

Together, the three companies said the new capacity would add roughly 5.2 gigawatts of demand to the national grid by late 2027, on top of the 11 gigawatts already under construction. The Edison Electric Institute estimated earlier this month that data center load could account for more than 12 percent of U.S. electricity demand by 2030, up from about 4 percent in 2023.

The political backdrop has shifted markedly in the eight days since the federal bill’s defeat. Senators Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the moratorium’s principal sponsors, said in separate statements last week that they would pivot to state-level advocacy and to a narrower compromise framework focused on grid impact disclosure rather than an outright training pause. Aides to Sanders confirmed Wednesday that staff had begun discussions with the office of Senator Josh Hawley, who opposed the original bill but has expressed interest in mandatory transparency rules.

In Albany, a bill that would require data centers above 100 megawatts to file quarterly reports on water and electricity consumption cleared a state Senate committee on Tuesday. A companion measure in California, modeled on the state’s earlier emissions disclosure law, is scheduled for a floor vote next week. Sacramento legislative staff said the California version would also empower the California Public Utilities Commission to deny interconnection to new facilities if their projected load would force accelerated retirement of existing renewable capacity.

“What you are watching is the federal vacuum getting filled in two places at once, by states and by industry self-regulation, and the two are not necessarily moving in the same direction,” said Marcus Liang, a senior fellow at the Center for AI Policy in Washington. “If New York and California finalize their bills, you have effectively re-created the federal moratorium debate but with thirty-five percent of the U.S. compute market under different rules than the rest.”

Industry representatives have argued that voluntary commitments, including a pledge announced Wednesday to source at least 60 percent of new capacity from non-fossil generation by 2028, should reduce pressure for binding rules. Critics noted that the pledge contains no enforcement mechanism and excludes facilities already under construction, which account for the bulk of the near-term load growth.

Financial markets received the announcements warmly. Shares in the three providers rose between 1.4 and 2.8 percent in afternoon trading, and a basket of utility stocks with significant data center exposure gained 1.1 percent. Brent crude, which has settled near $96 a barrel since the Iran ceasefire took effect on April 15, was little changed.

Power-grid analysts cautioned that the announcements understate the medium-term strain. A report circulated this week by consultancy Brattle estimated that interconnection queues in the PJM and ERCOT regions are already at record lengths, and that more than 40 percent of currently proposed data center projects may not be served on their stated timelines without significant transmission upgrades.

“There is a gap between the announcement calendar and the substation calendar, and that gap is widening,” said Helen Okafor, an independent energy analyst who advises institutional investors. “Companies are right that the federal political risk has receded, at least for the next twelve to eighteen months. But the physical risk, the question of whether the kilowatts actually show up, has not gone anywhere.”

Officials at the three providers said additional regional announcements, including projects in Spain and South Korea tied to overseas customer demand, would be detailed during quarterly earnings calls beginning next week.