China has overtaken the United States in the ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers, signaling Beijing's growing competitiveness in high-tech fields. According to the TOP500 list released in Hamburg, Germany, on May 13, China's LineShine supercomputer has taken the top position, surpassing the US's El Capitan.
Located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, LineShine achieves a performance of 2.198 exaflops, executing over 2 quintillion calculations per second—leading El Capitan by 20%. This marks the first time a Chinese supercomputer has topped this ranking since 2017, when Sunway TaihuLight held the No. 1 spot.
Previously, El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, US, had held the top spot since November 2024. Following in the rankings are Frontier at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, US; Aurora at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, US; 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.
Notably, LineShine is the first and only supercomputer to achieve performance above 2 exaflops while relying solely on standard central processing units (CPUs). While most modern supercomputers use GPUs (graphics processing units) to accelerate complex computations for AI models like ChatGPT or Claude, LineShine operates entirely on CPUs, which have fewer processing cores and are slower for complex tasks.
The TOP500 ranking has been published twice a year since 1993. Experts note that the list has become less relevant since the surge of AI, as it primarily includes government and academic systems that volunteer to participate, while tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are now leading advances in AI. A 2015 study by Cornell University estimated that El Capitan achieves only 22% of the computing performance of xAI's Colossus supercomputer facility in Memphis, Tennessee.
The technology race between the US and China is intensifying, marked by sanctions and export controls aimed at slowing each other down. The 2026 AI Index Report from Stanford University, released in April, shows that China has "effectively narrowed the gap" with the US in AI model performance, though the US still leads in producing top-tier AI models, while China dominates in patents and industrial robot installations.
