China Defies US Restrictions and Builds the World’s Fastest Supercomputer
China now has the world's fastest supercomputer, overtaking the United States. The system, known as LineShine and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, displaced the US system El Capitan from the top spot in the TOP500 ranking in terms of computing power.
The breakthrough comes amid an intense competition between Beijing and Washington for technological supremacy, marked by high tariffs and restrictions on a wide range of hardware components and software.
Since 1993, the TOP500 ranking has identified the world's most powerful supercomputers every six months through a series of standardized benchmarks that evaluate each system's performance, taking into account both its theoretical speed and its real-world performance, as well as its energy efficiency.
Historically, the ranking has been dominated by US-developed systems. However, LineShine has returned China to the top after nearly a decade out of first place.
El Capitan, located in Livermore, California, had held the top position since 2024. Now, benchmark results have confirmed that LineShine exceeds the US system's processing capacity by more than 20 percent.
With a power consumption of approximately 42.2 megawatts, the Chinese supercomputer delivers 2,198 exaflops, meaning it can perform more than 2 quintillion operations per second.
One of LineShine's most striking features is that, unlike most next-generation supercomputers, it does not use graphics processing units (GPUs). Instead, it relies exclusively on central processing units (CPUs), components widely used in smartphones, desktop computers, and laptops but rarely found in large-scale scientific computing systems.
Another notable feature is that its entire infrastructure is built with hardware and software developed in China. LineShine's architecture is based on the LingKun platform and consists of roughly 45,000 LX2 processors. Each processor has 304 cores and operates at a clock speed of 1.55 GHz.
The nodes are connected through a high-speed network called LingQi, designed to minimize latency and accelerate data exchange. The entire system runs on Kylin OS, a Linux-based operating system widely used in China's scientific and government computing infrastructure.
China's return to the top of the TOP500 ranking has been interpreted as an achievement that goes beyond simply possessing the world's fastest supercomputer, as the country is eager to show the world its tech industry can thrive despite lacking access to key US technologies.
During Donald Trump's first administration and throughout Joe Biden's presidency, the United States imposed strict export controls on components, software, and platforms related to advanced computing in an effort to slow China's technological progress. In response, Beijing adopted similar measures.
Those restrictions have intensified during Trump's current administration, particularly through tariffs and limits on imports of GPUs, advanced chips, and other components related to artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that now underpins a significant share of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
These restrictions have forced China to invest in developing new architectures and technologies capable of building supercomputers that can compete with the highest-performing US systems despite lacking access to certain state-of-the-art resources.
This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.