Sen. Warren Flags Nvidia Slurm Deal

Senator Elizabeth Warren asked the Defense Department and Energy Department to explain the risks of Nvidia owning Slurm, software used to run major U.S. supercomputers. (banking.senate.gov) In an April 14, 2026 letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Warren said the deal could reduce competition and create national-security problems if federal systems become more dependent on one company’s hardware and software. (banking.senate.gov) Slurm is the traffic controller for a supercomputer cluster: it decides which job runs where, when it starts, and how processors, memory, and graphics chips are assigned. SchedMD’s documentation describes it as a workload manager with tools for scheduling, resource allocation, accounting, and large-cluster administration. (schedmd.com) Nvidia said on December 15, 2025 that it had acquired SchedMD, the lead developer of Slurm, and would keep Slurm open-source and “vendor-neutral” across different hardware and software environments. Nvidia also said Slurm is used in more than half of the top 10 and top 100 systems on the TOP500 supercomputer ranking. (blogs.nvidia.com) Warren’s argument is that control of the scheduler matters because it sits between the chips and the workloads. In her letter, she said Nvidia could gain leverage over rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices by deciding which bug fixes, features, and support get priority. (banking.senate.gov) The federal angle is not abstract. Warren’s letter says the Department of Energy and Department of Defense rely widely on Slurm, and the Energy Department announced in May 2025 that its next flagship National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center system, Doudna, will be built by Dell and powered by Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. (banking.senate.gov) (energy.gov) Her office tied the concern to Nvidia’s broader position in supercomputing. The Senate release said Nvidia chips power more than 76% of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, while the TOP500 project’s latest list from November 17, 2025 showed Nvidia-backed systems still dominating the upper tier. (banking.senate.gov) (top500.org) Nvidia has pushed back on the premise that Slurm will become closed or exclusive. In its acquisition announcement, the company said it would keep distributing Slurm as open-source software, support heterogeneous clusters, and continue serving SchedMD’s existing customers in government, cloud computing, manufacturing, and research. (blogs.nvidia.com) The next step is a government answer, not a vote. Warren asked the Defense and Energy departments for information on their dependence on Nvidia hardware and software, putting a niche supercomputing tool at the center of a Washington fight over who controls the plumbing of artificial intelligence infrastructure. (banking.senate.gov)