WASHINGTON: A Chi­n­ese machine has seized the title of world’s most powerful supercomputer, ending nearly a decade of US dominance and underscoring Beijing’s drive to build advanced computing power with homegrown technology.

The system, called Lin­e­Shine, topped the closely watched TOP500 ranking unveiled at the major computing ISC conference in Hamburg, Germany.

It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese supercomputer has led the list, which has been published twice a year since 1993 and serves as an informal scoreboard for the world’s computing superpowers.

LineShine knocked the previous champion, the US Energy Department’s El Capitan, into second place.

Located in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, the mac­hine hit a sustained speed of 2.2 “exaflops” — a measure of how many calculations a computer can perform each second. Crucially, LineShine was built entirely with Chin­ese-designed processors, rather than the US-made chips that power most of the world’s top systems.

The US still claims three of the top four spots, with El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, coming in at second place. Out of Eur­ope, Germ­any’s JUPITER Booster rounds out the top five.

Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2026