Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiments Underground Facility (CHIEF)
China surpassed its own record by building a monstrous underground hypergravity centrifuge that can model scenarios with 1,900 times Earth’s real gravitational force, bending space and time with unprecedented power.
Built by Shanghai Electric Nuclear Power Group as part of the China Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiments Infrastructure (CHIEF), the CHIEF1900 will soon operate at 1,900 g-tonnes.
With these numbers, the new machine becomes the most powerful centrifuge in the world, surpassing the previous one, CHIEF1300.
CHIEF1300 came into operation in September 2025, with the capacity to generate up to 1,300 g-tonnes of hypergravity. The new centrifuge is about 46% more extreme in its capacity.
“We want to create experimental environments that span from milliseconds to tens of thousands of years, and from atomic to kilometer scales — under normal or extreme conditions of temperature and pressure,” he said. Chen Yunminchief scientist at CHIEF and professor at Zhejiang University, ao.
“This gives us the opportunity to discover entirely new phenomena or theories,” he added.
As New Atlas explains, both centrifuges are used to modeling intense gravity to compress time and scale in experiments.
This essentially allows scientists to simulate long-term or large-scale physical phenomena such as the structural integrity of dams, earthquake damage, landslides, nuclear waste storage and more.
By increasing the effective severity, researchers can speed up years or even decades of structural and geological effort for just a few hoursenabling experiences that would be impractical in the real world.
New Atlas details that CHIEF1900 was installed 15 meters below Zhejiang University, in Hangzhouin order to reduce the vibrational disturbance that it would cause if it were installed on surface infrastructure. It has not yet started carrying out experiments, but it is expected to be operational soon.
Citing figures released by the same magazine, the hypergravity infrastructure cost around 245 million euros to build and should become a beacon of international research, with the Chinese team inviting scientists from around the world to use the technology.
