The artificial intelligence and supercomputer industries are voicing concerns over a software company Nvidia recently acquired. While users of rival chips can currently access the firm's software freely and on equal terms, the acquisition has raised fears of discriminatory treatment. The unease highlights growing wariness toward Nvidia, which wields dominant influence across the AI industry.
Nvidia's December acquisition of SchedMD has drawn negative forecasts from the industry, Reuters reported on Sunday. SchedMD operates Slurm, an open-source software that schedules computing tasks. Slurm is a critical tool for training the large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots such as Claude, and is used by Anthropic, Meta, and France's Mistral, among others. Approximately 60% of the world's supercomputers run Slurm, Reuters added.
Industry officials who use the system expressed concern that "Nvidia could run the company to its own advantage by applying software updates to its own chips before those of competitors." Similar controversy arose over Bright Computing, which Nvidia acquired in 2022. After that acquisition, the software was restructured to favor Nvidia's products, forcing users of other chips to perform additional steps — a disadvantage that fueled the same type of anxiety. This unease reflects the industry's heightened vigilance toward Nvidia, which holds a near-monopolistic position with roughly 80 to 90 percent of the GPU market for AI.
As the controversy grew, Nvidia issued a statement last week saying, "Slurm is open source and we continue to provide updates for everyone." When announcing the SchedMD acquisition, Nvidia also stressed that it would "develop and broadly distribute open-source, vendor-neutral software."