China has reclaimed the top spot in global supercomputing for the first time in nearly a decade, with a machine called LineShine surpassing all American rivals to lead the influential TOP500 ranking. The announcement was made Tuesday at the ISC computing conference in Hamburg, Germany, and marks the first time a Chinese system has headed the list since Sunway TaihuLight did so in 2017.

LineShine, housed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, a major technology hub in southern China, achieved a sustained performance of 2.198 exaflops — meaning it can carry out more than 2 quintillion calculations per second. That gives it a roughly 20 percent performance lead over the previous champion, El Capitan, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and now ranks second. Two further American machines — Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois — hold third and fourth place, while Jupiter at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany rounds out the top five. These five are the only publicly verified exascale computers in the world. Other countries represented in the top 20 include the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

What makes LineShine particularly notable is its architecture: unlike other leading supercomputers, it runs entirely on general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) rather than the graphics processing units (GPUs) that dominate AI workloads and most high-performance computing. It is also built using Chinese-designed processors, a significant point given that US export controls have restricted China's access to the most advanced American chips. Jack Dongarra, an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the organisers of the TOP500 list, said LineShine demonstrated that China could hold its own in advanced computing despite those restrictions.