A supercomputer made by China beat U.S. supercomputers to reclaim the world No. 1 spot for the first time in nine years.
According to the global nonprofit foundation TOP500, China's LineShine (Chinese name Lingsheng) ranked No. 1 on the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers announced at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2026 in Hamburg, Germany, on the 23rd.
LineShine logged 2.198 exaflops (EF; 10 quintillion operations per second) on the high-performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark. That is about 80% of its theoretical peak performance (2.736 EF). TOP500 said it is "the first system to surpass 2 EF using only central processing units (CPUs)."
LineShine was built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center in China. It is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen (NSCS). It is equipped with the Chinese-made processor "Lingkun" and consists of 13.79 million 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz. It uses the Linux-based "Kylin" operating system (OS).
TOP500 said LineShine has never appeared on the supercomputer ranking list until now, adding, "It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese supercomputer has taken the top spot on the TOP500." The Chinese supercomputer that previously ranked No. 1 in the world was Sunway TaihuLight.
El Capitan at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which held the top spot in the world supercomputer rankings through last year, recorded 1.809 EF on this year's HPL benchmark and slipped to No. 2.
No. 3 is Frontier (1.353 EF) at the U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), No. 4 is Aurora (1.012 EF) at the U.S. Argonne National Laboratory, and No. 5 is JUPITER Booster (1.000 EF) at Germany's Jülich Supercomputing Centre.
China's state-run media said, "China has overcome restrictions on imports of advanced technologies such as U.S. Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and succeeded in building the world's top supercomputer using only CPUs," adding, "China has succeeded in establishing an independent ecosystem."