The Chinese supercomputer system LineShine, built on domestic chips at the Shenzhen National Supercomputer Center, ranked first in the TOP500 ranking, surpassing the previous leader, the American El Capitan from Lawrence Livermore’s lab. This is China’s first win in the rankings since 2017, and its first bid in three years.

The LineShine feature is a discrete GPU-free architecture: instead of separating CPU and graphics processing functions, Chinese developers have incorporated accelerated matrix and vector calculations directly into the chip. The system runs on nearly 14 million cores in 90 racks and is used for climate modeling and brain simulation. However, in tests that mimicked AI tasks, LineShine ranked only fourth, highlighting the gap between classical scientific benchmarks and modern demands of artificial intelligence.

Experts note that winning the TOP500 does not reflect the full picture of the computing race. Large cloud providers - Microsoft, Amazon, Google and xAI - have created their own AI-oriented supercomputers but are not included in the rating because its technique (the LINPACK test) is tailored to traditional scientific problems. According to analysts, China is using its TOP500 victory to demonstrate technological resilience, even though the system probably lacks advanced AI chips due to export restrictions.