China takes US crown on ranking of world’s fastest supercomputers | Technology
China takes US crown on ranking of world’s fastest supercomputers | Technology
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/6/24/china-takes-us-crown-for-worlds-fastest-supercomputer
Publish Date: 2026-06-24 00:02:00
Source Domain: www.aljazeera.com
China’s LineShine overtakes US-based El Capitan as most powerful supercomputer, according to the TOP500 list.
Published On 24 Jun 2026
China has displaced the United States on an influential ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers, underscoring Beijing’s growing capability to compete with the world’s leading superpower in cutting-edge technology.
China’s LineShine is the most powerful system on the planet, overtaking the US-based El Capitan, according to the biannual ranking announced in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday.
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LineShine, located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, achieved a performance of 2.198 exaflops, carrying out more than 2 quintillion calculations per second – a 20 percent lead over El Capitan, according to the latest TOP500 list.
LineShine’s position marks the first time a Chinese system has topped the list since Sunway TaihuLight did so in 2017.
El Capitan, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, had ranked as the top-performing system since November 2024.
Frontier, hosted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, ranked third, followed by Aurora at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and Jupiter at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany.
Other countries represented in the top 20 include the UK, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
Unlike other supercomputers, LineShine runs entirely on general-purpose central processing units (CPUs), which have fewer processing cores and are slower at performing complex tasks than the graphics processing units (GPUs) indispensable to running AI models, such as ChatGPT and Claude.
LineShine is the first and only system to achieve more than 2 exaflops in performance using a CPU-only design, according to the TOP500 list.
The TOP500 list has been published twice yearly since 1993, when computer scientists Erich Strohmaier and Hans Meuer first compiled statistics on…
