Governors in New York and California signaled Thursday that they would pursue state-level moratoriums on new large-scale artificial intelligence data centers, opening a regulatory front against the industry just two days after a federal pause died in a House committee.

The moves, telegraphed in back-to-back statements from Albany and Sacramento, mark the most concrete response yet to the 24-21 vote in the House Ways and Means Committee that killed the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez moratorium bill on Tuesday. That measure, which had cleared the Senate 52-48 on April 7, would have placed an 18-month pause on new training runs above a defined compute threshold and on data-center buildouts drawing more than 250 megawatts from the grid.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said she would introduce an executive order next week directing the New York State Public Service Commission to halt approvals for new hyperscale data-center interconnections above 300 megawatts pending a six-month grid-impact review. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said the governor was “actively reviewing” a draft bill from State Sen. Scott Wiener that would impose a one-year moratorium on new training facilities above a similar threshold in the state.

“The federal government had its chance and it punted,” said Daniel Reyes, a senior aide to Hochul, in a briefing with reporters in Albany. “New Yorkers are paying higher utility bills, and a single new data center campus in Saratoga County would consume more power than the city of Buffalo. The governor is not prepared to wait for Washington to find a backbone.”

The state-level push comes amid sharp disagreement inside the Democratic caucus over how to respond to the federal bill’s collapse. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who co-authored the bill with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said in a floor speech Wednesday that he would not pursue a watered-down compromise and instead urged states to act. Ocasio-Cortez, speaking on a podcast Thursday morning, called the House vote “a gift from the Ways and Means Committee to four trillion-dollar companies.”

But a group of moderate House Democrats, led by Rep. Jared Golden of Maine and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, are circulating a draft compromise that would replace the moratorium with mandatory energy-disclosure rules, a federal tax on data-center power consumption above a threshold, and a requirement that new training facilities procure matching clean-energy capacity. The draft, viewed by MetaCurrents, would not pause buildouts.

“We had the votes for disclosure and we had the votes for a power tax,” Golden said in an interview. “We never had the votes for a hard pause, and pretending we did cost us six months.”

Republican leadership has dismissed both the state-level push and the moderate compromise. House Speaker Mike Johnson, asked Thursday about the New York and California moves, said the federal government would “not permit a patchwork of fifty different rules to choke off the most important industry in the country.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump viewed any state-level moratorium as “an attack on American competitiveness with China” and said the administration was “exploring all legal options,” language that several legal analysts read as a hint at a preemption suit.

Whether the federal government can preempt state regulation of in-state electric utility interconnections is unsettled. “The Federal Power Act gives FERC jurisdiction over wholesale and interstate transmission, but retail interconnections and siting have historically been a state matter,” said Priya Ramaswamy, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. “If the administration tries to preempt Albany on a 300-megawatt interconnection review, they will lose in the Second Circuit. The harder question is what happens if Congress passes a federal preemption statute.”

The industry response has been measured but firm. The Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group representing the major hyperscalers, said the state moves “would chill an estimated $180 billion in announced U.S. data-center investment and push projects to jurisdictions with less rigorous environmental standards.” A spokesperson for one of the largest cloud providers, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, said the company had already paused two New York site selections pending clarity and was “looking very hard” at Texas, Ohio and Tennessee instead.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, sensing opportunity, posted on social media Thursday afternoon: “Texas is open for AI. No moratorium, no power tax, no nonsense.” Abbott’s office followed up with a statement offering expedited permitting for any project relocating from a moratorium state.

Energy analysts said the state-by-state map matters more than the federal fight. A recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate, updated this month, put data-center electricity demand at 9 percent of total U.S. consumption by 2028, up from 4.4 percent in 2023, with roughly 60 percent of new buildouts concentrated in five states.

“If New York, California, and Virginia all impose meaningful pauses, you have effectively cut the addressable footprint of new U.S. training capacity in half,” said Marcus Liang, a power-sector analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “If the buildouts shift to Texas and the Midwest, the carbon intensity goes up because the grids are dirtier, and the political coalition for federal action gets harder to assemble.”

Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the country, has so far stayed out of the fight. Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Hochul is expected to sign the executive order in Albany on Monday. The Wiener bill in Sacramento could move out of committee by mid-May, aides said, though Newsom has not committed to signing. Administration officials in Washington said additional steps on the federal response would be announced in the coming days.