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By Max A. Cherney
SAN FRANCISCO, April 15 (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the U.S. secretaries of the Department of Energy and Department of Defense on Tuesday, questioning them about Nvidia’s acquisition of SchedMD, which makes Slurm software.
Warren’s letter to Energy Department Secretary Chris Wright and Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed worries about Nvidia’s acquisition of SchedMD and requested "information about the government’s dependency on NVIDIA hardware and software."
Nvidia bought the Slurm software developer SchedMD in December. The software helps power about 60% of supercomputers worldwide. Nvidia did not disclose the size of the transaction.
SchedMD and Slurm are not household names. But the deal follows a pattern of Nvidia targeting under-the-radar companies whose technology serves as the glue holding the world’s most powerful data centers and supercomputers together.
In the letter, which was seen by Reuters, Warren asked for information about the extent to which computer systems in the U.S. departments of Energy and Defense are dependent on Nvidia’s hardware and software products. Warren asked whether either department has assessed national security risks related to the SchedMD acquisition.
"Customers everywhere benefit from our open source and free software," Nvidia said in a statement. "Slurm is open-source and we continue to provide enhancements for everyone."
The SchedMD - now Nvidia - Slurm software schedules computing tasks and is crucial for U.S. government supercomputers, which help forecast and run ballistic missile simulations and develop nuclear weapons. Engineers also use it to build the large artificial intelligence models that power chatbots such as Anthropic’s Claude.
SLURM’S ROLE IN U.S. DEFENSE SYSTEMS
"NVIDIA’s acquisition of Slurm turns a once free software into one of NVIDIA’s proprietary offerings, which may reduce competition and harm national security," Warren wrote. "This would give NVIDIA disproportionate control over a chokepoint that rival firms rely on to operate government supercomputers."
Some of the engineers and executives who use those supercomputer and AI systems fear that Nvidia will subtly favor itself, five people said, Reuters reported earlier this month.
There also is a hope among some users that Nvidia, the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, will reinvigorate the open-source Slurm, pouring some of its staggering resources into long-awaited updates of a system built years ago for government supercomputers.
Warren’s letter mentioned the Reuters story as a source.
ANTITRUST SCRUTINY OF NVIDIA DEALS
Warren’s letter discussed Nvidia’s acquisitions of other software companies and cited Bright Computing and Run:ai as examples, which it said have faced antitrust scrutiny.
Nvidia bought Bright Computing in 2022 and Run:ai in 2024. Both companies make software that helps run the computing infrastructure critical for supercomputers and clusters of AI chips.
"In addition to expanded supply of AI chips, these deals have given NVIDIA even more control over the critical software and the support that helps run data centers and supercomputing systems," Warren said.
"If NVIDIA controls both AI chips and the software layers that make these chips work, they are in a position to box out competitors by making their hardware harder to deploy and harder to support."