diff --git a/llmfoundry/data/finetuning/tasks.py b/llmfoundry/data/finetuning/tasks.py
index 915267786f..b9f588c284 100644
--- a/llmfoundry/data/finetuning/tasks.py
+++ b/llmfoundry/data/finetuning/tasks.py
@@ -515,6 +515,22 @@ def is_valid_ift_example(
     return True
 
 
+def _get_num_processes() -> int:
+    """Get the number of processes to use for dataset processing."""
+    detected_cpu_count = os.cpu_count() or 1
+    detected_cpus_with_margin = detected_cpu_count - 8
+    num_proc = max(1, detected_cpus_with_margin)
+
+    # Check if the user has set the MAX_NUM_PROC environment variable
+    # which caps the number of processes used for dataset processing.
+    if 'MAX_NUM_PROC' in os.environ:
+        max_num_proc_env = int(os.environ['MAX_NUM_PROC'])
+        if max_num_proc_env < num_proc:
+            num_proc = max_num_proc_env
+
+    return num_proc
+
+
 class StreamingFinetuningDataset(StreamingDataset):
     """Finetuning dataset with flexible tokenization using StreamingDataset.
 
@@ -960,18 +976,16 @@ def dataset_mapper(example: dict):
                     )
                 return mapping_fn(example, tokenizer)
 
-            detected_cpu_count = os.cpu_count() or 1
-            detected_cpus_with_margin = detected_cpu_count - 8
-            num_cpus_to_use = max(1, detected_cpus_with_margin)
-            if len(dataset) < num_cpus_to_use:
-                num_cpus_to_use = 1
+            num_proc = _get_num_processes()
+            if len(dataset) < num_proc:
+                num_proc = 1
 
             columns_to_remove = list(dataset[0].keys())
             tokenized_dataset = dataset.map(
                 dataset_mapper,
                 batched=False,
                 remove_columns=columns_to_remove,
-                num_proc=num_cpus_to_use,
+                num_proc=num_proc,
                 desc='Tokenizing dataset',
             )