China has taken the crown from the US in the list of the world’s most advanced computers | Modern

China’s LineShine has overtaken the US’s El Capitan as the world’s top computer, according to the TOP500 list.

China has overtaken the United States as the world’s fastest computing powerhouse, signaling Beijing’s growing competitiveness with the world’s leading supercomputers.

China’s LineShine is the world’s most powerful structure, surpassing the US’s El Capitan, according to double figures announced in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday.

LineShine, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, achieved an impressive 2,198 exaflops, performing more than 2 quintillion calculations per second – 20 percent ahead of El Capitan, according to the latest TOP500 list.

LineShine’s ranking is the first time a Chinese manufacturer has topped the list since Sunway TaihuLight did so in 2017.

El Capitan, which resides at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has been listed as the most successful planet since November 2024.

Frontier, operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, came in third, followed by Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and Jupiter at Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany.

Other countries represented in the top 20 include the UK, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Unlike other high-end computers, LineShine works on general-purpose central units (CPUs), which have fewer cores and are slower in performing complex tasks than the graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to run AI models, such as ChatGPT and Claude.

LineShine is the first and only solution to achieve more than 2 exaflops in performance using only CPU design, according to the TOP500 list.

The TOP500 list has been published twice a year since 1993, when computer scientists Erich Strohmaier and Hans Meuer began compiling statistics of the world’s top computers in preparation for a conference on the topic.

The series is based on the performance of supercomputers using the LINPACK Benchmark, which measures the amount of time it takes to solve a complex set of parallel lines.

Although the TOP500 list has been influential for many years, experts note that the ranking has not been relevant since the advent of AI.

While big tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon are at the forefront of today’s advances in AI, the list is made up mostly of government and academic initiatives that have committed to participating.

In a 2015 paper, Cornell University researchers reported that El Capitan achieved only 22 percent of the performance of xAI’s Colossus supercomputing center in Memphis, Tennessee.

China and the US are locked in a fierce battle to become world leaders in advanced technologies such as AI, with Washington and Beijing imposing a series of regulatory sanctions and export controls to undermine each other’s progress.

The 2026 AI Index Report, released in April by Stanford University, found that China has “closed” the gap in AI performance with the US.

While the U.S. develops many types of advanced AI, China has the advantage in patenting and developing industrial robots, the report said.