The success comes amid intense competition between Beijing and Washington for technological supremacy, which has included high tariffs and restrictions on a wide range of hardware components and software.
Since 1993, the TOP500 ranking has identified the world’s most powerful supercomputers every six months through a series of standardized benchmarks that evaluate each system’s performance, taking into account both its theoretical speed and real-world performance as well as its energy efficiency.
Historically, the rankings have been dominated by US-developed systems. However, Lineshine has returned China to the top after being out of first place for almost a decade.
El Capitan, located in Livermore, California, had held the top spot since 2024. Now, benchmark results have confirmed that Lineshine exceeds the processing capacity of the US system by 20 percent.
With a power consumption of about 42.2 MW, the Chinese supercomputer delivers 2,198 exaflops, meaning it can perform more than 2 quintillion operations per second.
One of Lineshine’s most striking features is that, unlike most next-generation supercomputers, it does not use a graphics processing unit (GPU). Instead, it relies exclusively on central processing units (CPUs), which are components widely used in smartphones, desktop computers, and laptops but rarely found in large-scale scientific computing systems.
Another notable feature is that its entire infrastructure is built with hardware and software developed in China. Lineshine’s architecture is based on the Lingkun platform and has approximately 45,000 LX2 processors. Each processor has 304 cores and operates at a clock speed of 1.55 GHz.
The nodes are connected via a high-speed network called Lingqi, which is designed to reduce latency and speed up data exchange. The entire system runs on Kylin OS, a Linux-based operating system widely used in China’s scientific and government computing infrastructure.
A clear message from China to America
China’s return to the top of the TOP500 ranking has been hailed as an achievement that goes far beyond the world’s fastest supercomputer, as the country is keen to show the world that its tech industry can flourish despite a lack of access to key US technologies.
During the first administration of Donald Trump and the presidency of Joe Biden, the United States imposed strict export controls on advanced computing-related components, software, and platforms in an effort to slow China’s technological progress. In response, Beijing adopted similar measures.
Those restrictions have intensified during Trump’s current administration, particularly through tariffs and limits on imports of GPUs, advanced chips and other components related to artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that now underpins a significant share of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
These restrictions have forced China to invest in developing new architectures and technologies capable of creating supercomputers that can compete with the highest-performing US systems despite lacking access to some cutting-edge resources.
This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and is translated from Spanish.
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