Chinese supercomputer displaces US system as most powerful

China took the lead in the TOP500 global supercomputer ranking, released on June 23, 2026, with LineShine, a system installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen. The machine surpassed El Capitan, from the United States, which topped the previous list.

Here are the top 10:

1. LineShine —China;
2. El Capitan—United States;
3. Frontier—United States;
4. Aurora—United States;
5. JUPITER Booster — Germany;
6. HPC7 — Italy;
7. Eagle—United States;
8. HPC6 — Italy;
9. Fugaku Supercomputer — Japan;
10. Alps — Switzerland.

The performance of supercomputers is compared by an international project linked to researchers and academic institutions. The list, published once every semester, uses the Linpack test: all submitted systems receive the same type of mathematical problem – solving a huge set of linear equations – and are classified by the speed with which they reach the result.

The LineShine recorded 2,198 exaflops of Rmax in the test. El Capitan, now in 2nd place, scored 1.809 exaflops. The Chinese system was around 21.5% above the North American one in processing capacity.

This is the first time that LineShine appears in the TOP500 ranking. Developed by the Chinese company Lingsheng Technology, the Chinese supercomputer adopts an unusual strategy. It uses an architecture based exclusively on CPUs, without the use of GPUs or dedicated accelerators, which contrasts with the dominant trend in more recent systems.

Despite the Chinese lead in the most powerful individual machine, the United States remains ahead in the aggregate capacity of the systems listed. In a survey based on the sum of the Rmax of the TOP500 supercomputers, the USA concentrates 38% of the total capacity in the ranking.

North Americans have 161 supercomputers listed among the 500 most powerful in the world, with 7,031 petaflops of Rmax combined. China appears in 2nd place in total capacity, with 2,377 petaflops and 31 systems. Next comes Japan, with 1,518 petaflops and 44 machines; Italy, with 1,450 petaflops and 18 systems; and Germany, with 1,403 petaflops and 41 supercomputers. Brazil ranks 16th in total capacity, with 143 petaflops and 10 machines listed.

Supercomputing is today a key area for scientific and industrial research. These systems are used in large-scale, high-cost, and computing-intensive projects such as high-energy physics, climatology, biomedicine, renewable energy, aeronautics, oil exploration, and complex industrial simulations.

Technology has also become central to the development of AI (artificial intelligence), an area that requires large processing capacity to train and operate advanced models. As a result, the race for supercomputers gained new economic and geopolitical weight, placing global investment in high-performance computing on another level.

BIG TECHS OF FORA

The TOP500 ranking, however, does not show all the computing capacity available in the world. Entry into the list depends on submission of system data and performance in the Linpack test. Therefore, private, military or machines installed in commercial data centers may be left out of the survey.

This limitation has become more relevant with the global race for artificial intelligence. Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and xAI operate large infrastructures of their own to train and run AI models, but not all of this capacity is submitted to the TOP500 or appears in its entirety in the ranking. Thus, the list is the main public reference for comparing tested supercomputers, but it does not measure all the computing power of big techs or their countries of origin.