A Chinese supercomputer has officially dethroned HPE’s El Capitan to become the world’s fastest, the first time a Chinese supercomputer has taken the number one position since 2017, according to the internationally recognised benchmark for high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
LineShine, also known as LingSheng, is housed in the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) and took the title in the June 2026 TOP500 list, an independent project tracking the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
It achieved 2.198 exaflops of verifiable performance, with a theoretical peak of 2.735 exaflops. This amounts to over two quintillion calculations per second, more than every human on the planet doing one calculation per second could calculate in eight years.
Its power will be turned to high-intensity research in areas such as climate science, AI training, drug discovery, molecular dynamics, or weapons simulations.
The previous record holder, the US Department of Energy and Lawrence Livermore Labs’ supercomputer El Capitan, is used for classified simulations on the safety of the US’ nuclear stockpile.
This is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese supercomputer has held the title, when the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer achieved 93 petaflops.
Like its predecessor, LineShine uses domestically produced components, and was built 13.7 million LX2 304C CPUs connected by Hangzhou Lingqi Technology Co’s proprietary LingQi interconnect networking system. The supercomputer also runs on Kylin, an operating system designed by China’s National University of Defense Technology.
In recent years, supercomputers in the upper echelons of the top500 have relied on a blend of CPUs and GPUs to achieve their performance, especially when the intended use case for the supercomputer requires both sequential and parallel processing.
Apart from LineShine, just one other supercomputer in the top 10 fastest in the world use a CPU-only design: Japan’s Fugaku.
Data Center Dynamics reported that the LX2 appears to have been designed at least in part by Chinese tech giant Huawei, citing though the firm has not officially confirmed this.
