China Retakes No. 1 Supercomputer Ranking From US With GPU-Free System

China has retaken the world's top spot in supercomputing, surpassing the US for the first time in nine years.

In the Top500 supercomputer benchmark released on June 23, Shenzhen-based Lianxiao ranked first. Its computing speed was 20% faster than El Capitan, the California-based US system that previously held the top spot.

Lianxiao has drawn attention for delivering the best performance using only standard central processing units, or CPUs, without high-performance graphics processing units, or GPUs. Most supercomputers rely on GPUs. China instead built special circuits into the chip to speed up matrix and vector calculations, allowing the system to perform GPU-like functions as well. The chips contain about 14 million computing cores, effectively tiny electronic brains.

One view is that US restrictions on Nvidia and AMD GPU exports to China reduced the country's dependence on GPUs and led it to develop a new computer architecture. Jimmy Goodrich, a senior researcher at the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, called CPUs "a loophole" in current restrictions and argued that controls on CPU exports to China and related manufacturing should also be tightened.

The US has led the supercomputing industry, holding the No. 1 Top500 ranking for 15 of the past 25 years. But China's recent rise has heightened concerns in the US. The Trump administration launched the Genesis Mission in November 2025 through public-private cooperation to sharply expand AI supercomputing capacity.

Kim Mi-ri, Hankyung.com reporter mirimiri@hankyung.com