Senator Elizabeth Warren is pressing the U.S. government to examine whether Nvidia’s acquisition of SchedMD, the developer behind the widely used Slurm software system, could create new risks for competition and national security. Warren sent a letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking how dependent their departments have become on Nvidia hardware and software, and whether they have assessed any national security dangers tied to the deal.
At the center of the concern is Slurm itself. Nvidia bought SchedMD in December, though it did not disclose the size of the transaction. Slurm may not be well known outside technical circles, but it is one of the most important pieces of scheduling software in high-performance computing, helping run about 60% of the world’s supercomputers. Warren’s argument is that Nvidia is not just buying another small software company. It is gaining influence over a core layer of software that helps manage some of the world’s most powerful computing systems.
That matters especially for the U.S. government. Slurm is crucial for supercomputers used by the Departments of Energy and Defense, including systems involved in weather forecasting, ballistic missile simulations, and nuclear weapons development. The same software is also used in building and operating the powerful AI systems behind products such as Anthropic’s Claude. Because Slurm sits at this central coordination layer, Warren says Nvidia could end up controlling a chokepoint that rival firms depend on to deploy and manage government supercomputers.
In her letter, Warren warned that Nvidia’s acquisition could turn what had been effectively a free and open software layer into something more tightly tied to the company’s own commercial ecosystem. If Nvidia controls both the chips and the software layers that make those chips work, it could make competing hardware harder to deploy and support. That, in turn, could reduce competition and potentially harm national security if critical government systems become too dependent on one supplier.
Nvidia rejected the suggestion that the acquisition would narrow access. The company said customers everywhere benefit from its open-source and free software and that Slurm remains open source, with Nvidia continuing to provide enhancements for all users. Also, some engineers and executives worry Nvidia could subtly favor its own products, though others hope the company’s enormous resources will finally bring long-awaited updates to a system originally built years ago for government supercomputers.
Warren also connected the Slurm deal to a broader pattern in Nvidia’s acquisition strategy. Her letter cited Nvidia’s earlier purchases of Bright Computing in 2022 and Run:ai in 2024, both companies that make software used to manage advanced computing infrastructure. She argued that these deals, taken together, have given Nvidia growing control not only over AI chips, where it is already dominant, but also over the software and support layers that help operate data centers and supercomputing systems.
The larger significance of this fight is that AI competition is no longer only about who makes the fastest chips. It is also about who controls the systems that connect, schedule, and manage those chips in the world’s most important computing environments. Warren’s letter was an attempt to force a closer look at whether Nvidia’s growing reach across both hardware and software could give it too much power over infrastructure that underpins U.S. defense, energy research, and advanced AI development.
