China's LineShine Tops TOP500, Becomes World's Fastest Supercomputer
‘El Capitan’ now ranks second, followed by two other US supercomputers at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois.
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[Image: Chetan Jha/MITSMR Middle East]
A Chinese supercomputer has outstripped its US counterparts to become the world’s most powerful computing system—the first since 2017 for a China-based machine to do so.
The LineShine supercomputer located at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen has displaced the US’ El Capitan from the top position in the latest rankings of the ‘Top500,’ a list viewed as a measure of national technological strength. The TOP500 is a twice-yearly ranking of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, based on their performance on the LINPACK benchmark.
LineShine differs from other high-performance computers by running entirely on conventional computer chips (CPUs), rather than graphics processors (GPUs) commonly used for AI. Notably, it was LineShine’s debut on the list.
Scientists behind the list note that the Chinese machine achieves a performance of ‘2.198 exaflops’ on the High Performance Linpack benchmark, meaning it can perform over ‘2 quintillion calculations per second’. It is the first and only system to do so.
The Supercomputers of 2026
‘El Capitan’ now ranks second, followed by two other US supercomputers at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois. Germany’s ‘JUPITER’ system dropped to fifth position.
The five are the only publicly verified exascale computers worldwide.
Other countries with supermachines in the top 10 include Italy, Switzerland, and Japan. The UK boasts 11 machines in the list of 500. Western Australia’s Setonix was the best-performing of the four machines, ranking 86th.
Notably, Nvidia powers over 400 of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers—81% of the TOP500. The chip giant has added 17 systems to its portfolio since the previous list, including Germany’s JUPITER. “JUPITER is mapping the human brain at a cellular scale, simulating Earth’s climate and advancing the AI behind next-generation 6G networks,” Nvidia’s release read.
