China has overtaken the United States on the influential list ranking the world's fastest supercomputers, showcasing Beijing's ability to compete with the world's leading superpower in advanced technology.
According to the semi-annual ranking announced on Tuesday in Hamburg, Germany, China's LineShine system surpassed the US-based El Capitan to become the most powerful system on the planet.
Located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, LineShine achieved 2.198 exaflops of performance according to the latest TOP500 list, performing more than 2 quintillion calculations per second and securing a 20 percent advantage over El Capitan.
LineShine's position marks the first time a Chinese system has topped the list since Sunway TaihuLight in 2017. El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, had been ranked as the highest-performing system since November 2024.
Jack Dongarra, a computer science professor at the University of Tennessee and one of the organizers of the TOP500 list, said LineShine's performance shows that China can compete in advanced computing despite US export restrictions on the most advanced chips. "Export controls may slow China's access to certain advanced components, but they also provide a strong incentive to develop domestic alternatives," Dongarra said.
Unlike other supercomputers, LineShine runs entirely on general-purpose central processing units (CPUs). This represents a design that has fewer processing cores and is slower at complex tasks compared to graphics processing units (GPUs), which are indispensable for artificial intelligence models. LineShine is the first and only system to exceed 2 exaflops of performance using only CPUs.
China and the US have been locked in a fierce struggle for global supremacy in cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence over the past decade, imposing mutual sanctions and export controls to hinder each other's progress. Stanford University's 2026 AI Index Report, published in April, revealed that China has "effectively closed" the gap with the US in AI model performance.
Addison Snell, co-founder of computing industry consultancy Intersect360 Research, said LineShine's ranking as the world's top supercomputer should create ripple effects in the US, Europe and Japan as countries continue to compete for AI supremacy. "The US is still the global leader in technology, but the gap is not wide," Snell added.
