Chinese supercomputer LineShine tops global rankings, ending US dominance

China's LineShine supercomputer in Shenzhen has topped the latest TOP500 list, becoming the world's fastest at 2.198 exaflops and ending America's reign since 2017. Remarkably, it runs entirely on homegrown CPUs—no Nvidia, AMD, or Intel GPUs—delivering a pointed message to Washington's chip export controls. But experts caution the win isn't an AI crown: LineShine ranked only fourth on AI-style benchmarks, and top US hyperscaler systems don't even enter.

China’s LineShine overtakes US-based El Capitan as most powerful supercomputer, according to the TOP500 list.

WASHINGTON: A Chi­n­ese machine has seized the title of world’s most powerful supercomputer, ending nearly a decade of US dominance and underscoring Beijing’s drive to build advanced computing power with homegrown technology. The system, called Lin­e­Shine, topped the closely watched TOP500 ranking unveiled at the major computing ISC conference in Hamburg, Germany. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese supercomputer has led the list, which has been published twice a year since 1993 and serves as an informal scoreboard for the world’s computing superpowers. LineShine knocked the previous champion, the US Energy Department’s El Capitan, into second place. Located in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, the mac­hine hit a sustained speed of 2.2 “exaflops” — a measure of how many calculations a computer can perform each second. Crucially, LineShine was built entirely with Chin­ese-designed processors, rather than the US-made chips that power most of the world’s top systems. The US still claims three of the top four spots, with El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, coming in at second place. Out of Eur­ope, Germ­any’s JUPITER Booster rounds out the top five. Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2026

China’s LineShine debuts at number one in Top500 – a list sometimes viewed as a national measure of global tech prowess A supercomputer in China now outranks its US counterparts as the world’s most powerful. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped a list sometimes viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess. The LineShine computer in Shenzhen displaced top-ranked US computer El Capitan in the Top500 rankings released on Tuesday. It was LineShine’s debut on the list. Continue reading...

China has reclaimed the world’s fastest supercomputer crown for the first time since 2017, according to the latest TOP500 rankings released at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday. LineShine, built by the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, achieved 2.198 exaflops of performance – nearly 2.2 quintillion calculations per second – surpassing the previous champion, El Capitan, at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which reached 1.809...