China Takes Supercomputer Crown From U.S. for First Time Since 2017

New York Times ^ | 06/23/2026

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A supercomputer in Shenzhen was declared the world’s fastest. It uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units.

China took back a coveted computing crown from the United States on Tuesday, ratcheting up a fierce technological competition that has implications for science, national security and geopolitics.

LineShine, a massive computing system in Shenzhen, China, was declared the world’s fastest by a group of researchers using a set of standard tests for supercomputers. Besides raw speed, the system stood out because it uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units, which most high-end supercomputers rely on for heavy number crunching.

That underlying design could point to a better way to blend artificial intelligence with traditional scientific tasks, said Jack Dongarra, an organizer of the so-called Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Dr. Dongarra, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee, recently inspected the new machine, at the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center. LineShine’s test results were more than 20 percent faster than those of El Capitan, a system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that has topped a twice-yearly ranking of supercomputer performance since November 2024. China had not placed a machine at the top of the list since 2017.

“It’s an impressive system,” Dr. Dongarra said of LineShine. “They upped us by developing a system that is not reliant on GPUs.”

The new supercomputer adds to the race between China and the United States for technological supremacy. U.S. tech giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have developed leading A.I. models, while another American company, Nvidia, has become the world’s dominant supplier of A.I. chips. China has tried to innovate in different ways, with the Chinese start-up DeepSeek releasing a cutting-edge A.I. model

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