The LineShine supercomputer at Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center has claimed the top spot on the June 2026 edition of the TOP500 list with a sustained double-precision performance of 2.198 Exaflops, surpassing the previous champion El Capitan (1.809 Exaflops) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US. It is the world’s first supercomputer to exceed the 2 Exaflops threshold and China’s first No. 1 since Sunway TaihuLight in 2017. LineShine uses entirely domestic hardware: its base computing unit is the LingKun platform’s self-developed Lineshine-LX2 processor based on the ARMv9 architecture, with 304 cores per chip at 1.55 GHz, giving a total of about 13.79 million cores system-wide, a full-power load of about 42.2 MW, and an energy efficiency of 52.07 GFlops/W — nearly double that of Intel Ponte Vecchio on Aurora (26.15 GFlops/W). Notably, LineShine does not contain any AI accelerators, which many analysts attribute to China’s difficulty in accessing advanced AI chip manufacturing tools under US export controls.
However, the TOP500 crown does not equate to global AI computing leadership. In the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark simulating AI training tasks, LineShine ranks only fourth, as pure CPU architectures cannot match the reduced-precision acceleration of GPU/accelerator-based systems. Jimmy Goodrich, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley, said: „If hyperscale cloud vendors (such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google) submitted their own systems for the rankings, LineShine’s title of world’s fastest would not even make the top five.“ A study last year already found that xAI’s Colossus system, owned by Elon Musk, likely already exceeds El Capitan in real-world computing power. Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, said bluntly: „I’m not surprised it’s No. 1; what surprises me is that they decided to submit and seek public recognition.“ Analysts widely believe that the strategic intent behind this submission is to demonstrate that export controls have not stopped China’s computing power. The current TOP500 list has five systems above the Exascale threshold: LineShine (China), El Capitan, Frontier (US), Aurora (US), and Jupiter Booster (Germany).