Computer wars heat up as Chinese supercomputer tops all US machines in speed for first time since 2017

A Chinese supercomputer system surpassed an American computer for the world's fastest, according to an industry list published in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday, giving China the edge over the U.S. with the fastest supercomputer for the first time since 2017.

LineShine, a system built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center in China, took the crown from El Capitan, a supercomputer housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which had reigned supreme since November 2024.

The last time China held the top spot was in 2017, when the Sunway TaihuLight was ranked No. 1. The U.S. had held the top spot consistently since dethroning Japan's Fugaku in 2021.

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LineShine, unlike the majority of high-end supercomputers, is not powered by graphics processing units (GPUs) such as the ones made by chip manufacturer Nvidia. The new compute champion, instead, runs on standard central processing units (CPUs). In total, LineShine runs on over 13 million CPUs, according to the TOP500 List.

The TOP500 List uses a metric called the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark to measure supercomputer performance. Evaluating a computer along this benchmark involves making the system run a protracted series of calculations, pushing the system to its limit in an attempt to ascertain how much computing it can actually do.

"This performance does not reflect the overall performance of a given system, as no single number ever can. It does, however, reflect the performance of a dedicated system for solving a dense system of linear equations," the TOP500 list writes on its website.

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Using this benchmark, TOP500 determined that LineShine performed 20% better than El Capitan.

LineShine's entrance onto the list also made it the fifth supercomputer in the world to demonstrate exascale capacity, meaning it can perform one quintillion calculations per second.

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While China nabbed the top spot, the U.S. still dominated the rankings overall, holding the second, third and fourth spots with El Capitan, Frontier and Aurora.

The Chinese computer's debut on the list comes one day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order related to quantum computing, moving the U.S. to upgrade its efforts in the emerging technology that some experts say will transform the computing landscape.