Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday pressed the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to spell out whether they have weighed national-security and competition risks tied to Nvidia’s recent acquisition of SchedMD, the small company behind the Slurm scheduler. In a letter, she asked officials to detail how heavily government supercomputers lean on Nvidia hardware and software. The push adds fresh political heat to a deal that has already rattled engineers and national-lab operators.
Warren sent the letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, asking for information on the departments’ reliance on Nvidia systems and whether either agency has carried out a formal national-security risk assessment, according to Reuters. The move follows reporting that Nvidia quietly bought SchedMD last December, prompting worries among some supercomputing users that a dominant chip maker in control of a widely used scheduler could tilt the playing field toward its own stack.
Why Slurm Matters
Slurm is an open-source workload manager that decides which jobs run where and when across large clusters and supercomputers. SchedMD's site says Slurm is "in widespread use at government laboratories, universities and companies worldwide" and handles workload management for top systems listed on the TOP500. That central role means any shift in how Slurm is developed or supported can ripple through weather forecasting, national-lab simulations and the AI training pipelines used by major model builders.
Nvidia's Promise and Industry Unease
Nvidia said in December 2025 that it had acquired SchedMD and that it would keep developing and distributing Slurm as open-source and vendor-neutral, promising improvements for the broader community in a company post. Nvidia framed the purchase as an effort to strengthen open-source tooling, but some engineers and cloud operators worry that having a dominant GPU vendor own the scheduler could result in subtle favoritism for Nvidia hardware in updates or support priorities.
Antitrust And Security Questions
Warren highlighted what she described as Nvidia's pattern of buying lower-profile infrastructure companies and asked whether regulators and federal agencies have tracked possible harms, pointing to earlier deals such as Bright Computing and Run:ai. Bright Computing was acquired by Nvidia in 2022, as reported by Forbes, and European officials took a close look at Nvidia's purchase of Run:ai after member-state referrals raised antitrust concerns, as covered by Mondaq. Those episodes help explain why Warren is asking whether control over both chips and scheduling software could give Nvidia an outsized advantage.
What's Next
Warren requested records and analyses from the agencies and pressed for details on how dependent the government is on Nvidia hardware; the departments had not publicly responded when Reuters reported on the letter. Nvidia has said Slurm will remain open-source and that it is continuing to provide enhancements for all users, and the company has not disclosed the financial terms of the SchedMD deal. Depending on what the agencies turn up, the inquiry could set the stage for congressional oversight or further regulatory review of how critical AI infrastructure is put together and governed.
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