Built from 13.79 million domestic processor cores at a Shenzhen data center, the new No. 1 scored 2.198 exaflops on the standard High Performance Linpack benchmark, displacing Lawrence Livermore's El Capitan and sharpening the question of whether U.S.
China's LineShine supercomputer has claimed the No. 1 spot on the June 2026 TOP500 list, the twice-yearly global ranking that has measured supercomputer performance since 1993. The debut is the first time a Chinese system has topped the list.
On the standard High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a dense linear-algebra workload that has anchored supercomputer rankings for three decades, LineShine delivered 2.198 exaflops per second, according to TOP500. That is roughly 1.21 times the previous No. 1, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's El Capitan, which measured 1.809 exaflops/s on the same benchmark. LineShine's theoretical peak is estimated at 2.736 exaflops/s. Lawrence Livermore claims a higher theoretical peak of 2.821 exaflops/s for El Capitan, a number that does not show up in the HPL ranking and is best read as a hardware-vendor ceiling rather than a measured number.
The surprise is not the rank. It is what is inside. LineShine, built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center and housed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, is an all-CPU machine. The architecture pairs 304-core LX2 processors, designed and produced in China, tiled at scale to deliver 13.79 million cores in total. There are no Nvidia accelerators and no AMD accelerators inside the system. Forbes, LiveMint, and StartupFortune have all flagged the absence of Western chips as the headline; the architecture itself is the story.
That detail reframes the policy stakes. The United States has spent the past three years restricting the export of advanced AI and HPC accelerators to China, on the theory that cutting off access to top-end chips would slow Chinese progress at the frontier. LineShine is the first top-ranked machine in the modern era to test that theory. The chip throttle did not slow the climb to No. 1. It forced a different engine.
The architectural bet is wide and shallow where Western exascale systems are narrow and deep. The Next Platform's deep dive on LineShine describes an interconnect and memory hierarchy built around throughput rather than the accelerator-heavy designs that dominate the U.S. fleet. El Capitan pairs AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs. Oak Ridge's Frontier, No. 3 at 1.353 exaflops/s, and Argonne's Aurora, No. 4 at 1.012 exaflops/s, follow the same hybrid CPU-GPU playbook. China's bet, made under chip pressure, was to scale CPU cores alone, and according to the Wikipedia entry on the system it now sits above all of them on HPL.
The result is not a verdict on every kind of compute. HPL is a dense linear-algebra workload that responds well to wide CPU parallelism and high-bandwidth memory. Modern AI training is dominated by matrix operations where GPUs shine, and HPL does not measure those. The benchmark that put LineShine on top is also the benchmark where many-core CPUs are most competitive. The performance gap that matters in 2026 is whether LineShine's all-CPU design can move the needle on AI training, simulation, and climate workloads; the TOP500 HPL number is one signal, not the whole story.
What the number does change is the policy question. If the goal of U.S. export controls was to slow Chinese progress at the frontier, LineShine is the first counter-example at the very top of the ranking. The Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center's bet on domestic silicon, made under chip pressure, delivered the world's fastest measured HPL system without a single restricted component. The next round of U.S. restrictions now has to answer a harder question: what, exactly, are they slowing down?
Three things to watch. The November 2026 TOP500 list, where LineShine's HPL number will be re-tested and where other Chinese all-CPU machines may appear. Independent power-efficiency and interconnect benchmarks, which will decide whether the all-CPU design holds up outside HPL. And Washington's response, where the U.S. export-control architecture is now staring at a system that hit the top of the ranking using only hardware the controls were meant to keep out of Chinese data centers.