China retakes crown for world’s fastest supercomputer

LineShine vaulted to No. 1 on the TOP500 list with an HPL score of 2.198 exaflops, ending El Capitan’s run and returning the supercomputing crown to China for the first time since Sunway TaihuLight in 2017.

“World’s fastest” here means fastest on the High Performance Linpack benchmark, not the broadest measure of every workload a machine might run. TOP500 ranks systems by Linpack performance and makes every attempt to verify submitted results; the 67th list was announced on June 23, 2026, at ISC 2026 in Hamburg, Germany, and it was the first time five systems crossed one exaflop on HPL.

LineShine is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen and was built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center. The machine uses the custom LingKun platform, 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz, the proprietary LingQi interconnect and Kylin OS; it also draws about 42.2 megawatts and reaches 52.07 Gigaflops per watt.

El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had held No. 1 since November 2024 with a TOP500 score of 1.742 exaflops and a design based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says El Capitan is the first exascale system for the National Nuclear Security Administration and is central to stockpile stewardship, weapon modernization and AI and machine learning workflows tied to national security.