China’s National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen has announced plans to deploy a CPU-based supercomputer with a targeted performance of two exaflops, consisting exclusively of China-made hardware.

According to a report from Tom’s Hardware, the system, dubbed LineShine, will comprise 47,000 CPUs across 92 compute cabinets, along with a one-million-port interconnect, 36 networking cabinets, 10Tbps of bandwidth, and 650PB of storage when it comes online.

In its pilot verification phase, the supercomputer will be powered by 100 Huawei Kunpeng servers built on Arm-based Taishan cores, totaling 12,800 cores. The production system will scale to 1,580 blade servers using x86 CPUs with 101,120 cores and a theoretical peak above 10 petaflops, the report added, citing translated Chinese-language press materials.

At present, the world’s most powerful supercomputer is the 1.74 exaflops El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and powered by more than 44,500 AMD MI300A APUs. There are currently four exascale systems in the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, all of which are powered by GPUs.

Should the Chinese supercomputer achieve its touted aims, it would be the first system to offer exascale performance with a CPU-only-based approach. It is unclear when the LineShine is expected to go live, and if the two exaflops performance would be the system’s theoretical peak – El Capitan has a theoretical peak of 2.8 exaflops.

In 2023, Top500 co-founder Jack Dongarra said that when it comes to exascale computing, the US is likely losing out to China. While China once had more machines on the list than any other country, owing to geopolitical factors such as trade sanctions, the country has decreased the number of submissions in recent years, instead opting to publish its own version of the list, consisting exclusively of domestic systems.

The country is known to have a number of exascale systems in operation, but did not include them on the 2024 list, which detailed the 100 highest-performing supercomputers in the country. At the time, questions were raised about whether the Chinese government was deliberately downplaying the technological power currently available in the region to try to avoid further sanctions from the US government.

As of June 2025, China had 47 systems on the list, the second-highest number behind the US. Its most powerful verified system is the 93.01 petaflops Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai.