For the first time in nine years, a supercomputer from China has come ahead of all other machines in the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The list was announced at the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Germany.
The number one spot in the list has been given to LineShine – a supercomputer from China that was previously unlisted. LineShine has displaced the US’ own El Capitan as the world’s most powerful supercomputer as measured by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.
Its debut marks the first time since 2017 that a Chinese system has led the TOP500, and it also takes over the No. 1 position on the HPCG ranking with 22.00 HPCG-Petaflop/s, according to a press release from the organization.
The supercomputer from China has not just topped the list of the world’s most powerful machines. It has also achieved 2.198 Exaflop/s on the HPL benchmark, making it the “first system in the TOP 500 to exceed two exaflops of sustained double-precision performance using CPUs only.”
LineShen is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen (NSCS) and built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center. It is based on a custom Chinese processor and the “LingKun” platform: 13.79 million cores across 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz, linked by the proprietary LingQi interconnect and running Kylin OS.
The supercomputer draws approximately 42.2 megawatts of power and comes with an efficiency of 52.07 Gigaflops/Watt. LineShine reached 7.92 Exaflop/s for fourth place, a comparatively modest 3.6x speedup over its HPL score, indicating a CPU-only design without dedicated low-precision accelerators, the press release added.
It differs from other high-performance supercomputers because it relies on CPUs rather than modern graphics processing units (GPUs) used for AI.
However, LineShine’s debut marks a significant achievement, increasing the number of systems sustaining over one exaflop/s on HPL from four to five. Also, for the first time, the exascale systems are distributed across the Asian, North American, and European continents simultaneously.
While LineShine might have captured the top spot, the next three supercomputers in the list are from the United States.
The most powerful supercomputer from 2025, El Capitan, is at the second position with 1.89 Exaflop/s on HPL. El Capitan is at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the US. It has 11.34 million cores and 60.94 Gigaflops/Watt, built on the HPE Cray EX255a architecture with AMD 4th Gen EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer is in third position in the rankings with a performance of 1.35 Exaflop/s on HPL. The fifth most powerful supercomputer, according to the list, is the Jupiter Booster operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany.
Supercomputers in the modern world are used for everything from predicting the weather and developing AI to advancing medical innovations and simulating nuclear explosions for defense needs. Therefore, they are in some ways considered a parameter of a country’s technological prowess. China’s win in this year’s list could translate to worries for the West in general, but the more powerful machines might be coming soon from the US and Europe.
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