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

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

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

LineShine tops the Top500 supercomputer ranking

On the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used for the ranking, LineShine delivers 2.198 exaflops/s, ahead of the leading US supercomputer’s 1.809 exaflops/s. Top500 explains that the machine relies on 13.79 million cores, distributed across Chinese LX2 processors with 304 cores each, 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 drops to fifth place

LineShine’s arrival means there are now 5 exaflop-class supercomputers worldwide, capable of carrying out more than one trillion (10¹⁸) operations per second. One of these 5 exaflop-class systems is European: JUPITER, inaugurated in Germany in 2025, which 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.

Although JUPITER was the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer when it launched, LineShine’s entry pushes it down to fifth in the Top500 ranking. The second most powerful European supercomputer is HPC7 in Italy, which is not exaflop-class.