Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs best US machines to be ranked world’s fastest
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LineShine, installed at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, clinched the top spot in the 67th TOP500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The new system has already been used in a range of fields, giving developers another route to achieve supercomputing power. The machine, which came online in the first half of 2026, can reach speeds of 2.198 exaFLOPS — where 1 exaFLOP is 1 quintillion (1018) floating-point operations, or mathematical calculations, per second (FLOPs) — making it the only supercomputer on the planet to exceed 2 exaFLOPS per second.
It's also the first time China has hosted the world's fastest supercomputer since 2017. A FLOP is a type of calculation used to benchmark computing performance. Exascale supercomputers can perform more than 1 quintillion of these operations every second.
In comparison, home computers can perform roughly 5 trillion FLOPS. According to TOP500, LineShine can achieve speeds about 22% faster than El Capitan, a supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California that had previously held the top spot since November 2024. The system’s computing power is the result of "a comprehensive breakthrough in a series of core technological barriers," according to a translated statement from China's National Supercomputing Center.
Unlike many other supercomputers, LineShine uses only central processing units (CPUs) to perform calculations. Other systems rely on both CPUs and graphics processing units(GPUs), which run many jobs simultaneously by dividing tasks among smaller, specialized cores. Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
government has restricted exports of semiconductor chips to China, including GPUs. However, startups such as DeepSeek have wrangled other technological advancements to train artificial intelligence (AI) models with fewer and less powerful GPUs than comparable systems such as ChatGPT.
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