Hong Kong —
China has clinched the top spot on a list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, overtaking the United States for the first time since 2017 with a model powered by homegrown chips amid an intense race for tech supremacy between the two superpowers.
The LineShine machine, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in China’s tech hub of Shenzhen, replaced the American titleholder El Capitan in the latest biannual TOP500 ranking, which tracks the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
The ranking released on Tuesday showed the LineShine achieved a computing speed 20% faster than El Capitan, which is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Supercomputers, designed for complex computations at unmatched speeds, are often used to discover and develop new drugs, forecast weather, train AI models and conduct a wide range of simulations.
