Lingsheng or LineShine, built from home-grown CPUs, is designed to surpass America’s El Capitan, the world’s fastest supercomputer
2-MIN READ2-MIN ListenLing Xinin OhioPublished: 8:05pm, 5 May 2026Updated: 8:14pm, 5 May 2026China has unveiled a new supercomputer built from entirely home-grown CPUs, with the aim of beating the world’s fastest machine while sidestepping US export controls.Known as Lingsheng or LineShine, it is designed to reach 2 exaflops – or two quintillion calculations per second – edging past the 1.8-exaflop El Capitan, the current record holder at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Unlike other exascale supercomputers, which rely on graphics processing units (GPUs), LineShine will run entirely on central processing units (CPUs).
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Huang Xiaohui, the centre’s deputy director, told a conference in Shenzhen on April 24 that LineShine had achieved full-stack independence, from underlying hardware to core software, as a fully domestic supercomputer.
“By the end of 2025, we completed full system deployment and activation, with sustained performance exceeding 2 exaflops. Its performance has already surpassed that of the United States’ El Capitan, returning China to the world’s No 1 position,” she said in remarks broadcast by Shenzhen TV, a city broadcaster.
Huang said LineShine used the world’s most powerful CPUs and adopted an integrated architecture that supported both traditional high-performance computing and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
