LineShine becomes the world’s most powerful supercomputer, ahead of El Captain

According to the Top500 ranking, China’s LineShine supercomputer has become the world’s most powerful system, overtaking the United States’ El Captain.

Less than a year ago, the United States held a complete lead in Top500’s supercomputer ranking, an indicator of a country’s technological progress. In November, HPE-built supercomputer El Captain was the most powerful system on the planet. That dominance has now ended: Top500’s new June 2026 ranking places China’s LineShine at the top. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese supercomputer has ranked number one worldwide. The machine is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen and was built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center.

LineShine leads the Top500 ranking

On the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used as the basis for this ranking, LineShine delivers 2,198 exaflops/s, ahead of the leading US supercomputer’s 1,809 exaflops/s. Top500 explains that the system relies on 13,79 million cores, distributed across Chinese 304-core LX2 processors running at 1,55 GHz. LineShine runs Kylin OS. In energy terms, it draws 42,2 megawatts of power and achieves energy efficiency of 52,07 gigaflops/watt.

European supercomputer falls to fifth place

LineShine’s arrival means there are now 5 exaflop supercomputers worldwide, meaning machines capable of carrying out more than one trillion (10¹⁸) operations per second. One of these 5 exaflop systems is European: JUPITER, which was inaugurated in Germany in 2025 and reaches one exaflop/s of computing power. “With computing power exceeding 1 exaflop, JUPITER will revolutionise science and innovation and shape new policies across Europe,” the European Commission wrote when announcing the supercomputer.

JUPITER and HPC7 among Europe’s systems

When it launched, JUPITER was the world’s 4th most powerful supercomputer. However, LineShine’s entry has pushed it down to fifth position in the Top500 ranking. Europe’s second most powerful supercomputer is HPC7 in Italy, which is not an exaflop system.