Chinese supercomputer powered by homegrown chips tops US models in global ranking
By John Liu, CNN
Hong Kong (CNN) — China has clinched the top spot on a list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, overtaking the United States for the first time since 2017 with a model powered by homegrown chips amid an intense race for tech supremacy between the two superpowers.
The LineShine machine, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in China’s tech hub of Shenzhen, replaced the American titleholder El Capitan in the latest biannual TOP500 ranking, which tracks the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
The ranking released on Tuesday showed the LineShine achieved a computing speed 20% faster than El Capitan, which is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Supercomputers, designed for complex computations at unmatched speeds, are often used to discover and develop new drugs, forecast weather, train AI models and conduct a wide range of simulations.
The success of the LineShine comes as the US and China ratchet up their tech rivalry and Washington attempts to curb Beijing’s access to frontier technologies from AI to chips that could power its military.
Since President Donald Trump’s first term, the US has ramped up export controls and restrictions aiming to slow China’s advancement in these technologies.
China’s National Supercomputing Center said in an online statement that the LineShine is the “result of breakthroughs across a series of core technological bottlenecks.”
LineShine’s achievements “mark a historic leap for China’s supercomputing sector in overcoming foreign technology restrictions and building an independently controlled hardware and software ecosystem,” it said.
Notably, the LineShine relies entirely on CPUs – conventional computing chips often found in consumer electronics – instead of specialized GPUs – the highly sought-after chips that power most of the supercomputers today and are dominated by American suppliers like Nvidia.
Through a series of measures starting in 2022, Washington has cut off China’s access to the cutting-edge GPUs, throttling Chinese companies’ efforts in competing for the top AI models with US tech giants.
The moves forced Chinese companies to innovate around the restrictions. Last year, China-based AI startup DeepSeek released a model that delivered near industry-leading performance with far fewer advanced chips, surprising Silicon Valley and the wider industry.
Speaking at the TOP500 award ceremony in Hamburg, Germany, LineShine chief designer Lu Yutong said the machine broke through from the conventional hybrid architecture of using both CPUs and GPUs for supercomputers.
The system leverages domestically developed, full-stack computing infrastructure, including CPUs and high-bandwidth memory (HBM), for purposes of scientific, engineering and AI workloads, Lu said, according to the statement from China’s National Supercomputing Center.
Since the launch of LineShine, the supercomputer has been used for applications ranging from climate modeling and engineering simulations to drug discovery, neuroscience and AI, the center said.
Despite the milestone, experts caution against overinterpreting the new ranking as a measure of a country’s AI capabilities.
“It’s an impressive technical achievement,” said Andrew Rohl, director at the National Computational Infrastructure in Australia. “It’s not relevant if you’re asking the question, ‘who’s got the best AI capability?’ or ‘who’s got the best infrastructure to do AI well?’ The TOP500 is not a good measure of that.”
Rohl explained the TOP500 ranking is based on a decades-old benchmark designed to measure traditional scientific computing workloads instead of modern AI. Additionally, many of the most powerful AI systems built by US giants such as xAI and Google or supercomputers run by top defense facilities do not enter the ranking, either for sensitivity or economic reasons, he said.
Following El Capitan, which ranks second on the Top500 list, are two other American machines in national libraries in Tennessee and Illinois, as well as one in Germany.
Beyond the top tier supercomputers on the list, countries like Italy, Switzerland, and Japan maintain a presence in the top ten.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
