There you have it! China just built the fastest supercomputer on Earth — with no Nvidia, no GPUs,…
June 28, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
China Threat Workforce AI
There you have it! China just built the fastest supercomputer on Earth — with no Nvidia, no GPUs, and no Western software anywhere in the stack.
Everyone is staring at the speed. 2,198 exaflops. More than 20 percent faster than El Capitan, the Livermore machine that held the top spot since 2024.
That is not the part that should scare you.
Look at HOW they did it.
LineShine, installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, runs entirely on CPUs. Roughly 45,000 domestic LX2 processors on the LingKun platform. 304 cores each. No H100s. No A100s. No AMD. Not a single chip we tried to deny them.
The whole point of U.S. export controls — tightened from Trump through Biden and still in place today — was one bet: cut China off from Nvidia and you cap their compute ceiling.
They didn't wait for the chips. They routed around them.
And it goes deeper than silicon. The operating system is Kylin OS — domestic. The interconnect is a proprietary fabric called LingQi — domestic. Silicon, OS, networking. Every layer made in China, by China, for China.
We targeted the hardware. We targeted the toolchains. They built their own of both.
Now the fair counterpoint, because I will not oversell it: a CPU-heavy system that tops a general benchmark is not automatically a better AI training rig. GPUs still win the matrix math that LLMs live on. Huawei's Ascend line is probably doing that work somewhere the TOP500 never sees.
Fine. Grant all of it.
A machine doing 2,198 exaflops of general compute is still a serious weapon. Climate modeling. Nuclear simulation. Materials science. Cryptographic research. None of that needs a GPU. That is a national instrument, fully sovereign, that no export rule can switch off.
This is the lesson America keeps refusing to learn. You cannot sanction your way to a lead. Restrictions buy you time. They do not buy you superiority. All they did here was force a competitor to go build the entire stack itself — and now they own it end to end, with no kill switch we control.
I came to this country because America out-built everyone. Not because it out-restricted them.
Compute independence is not a press release in Shenzhen. It is happening. The only question left is whether we answer it by building faster — or by writing another memo about what we are willing to sell.
REPLACEMENT — out July 28. The whole book is about this exact collision.
What are we actually building in response?
Everyone is staring at the speed. 2,198 exaflops. More than 20 percent faster than El Capitan, the Livermore machine that held the top spot since 2024.
That is not the part that should scare you.
Look at HOW they did it.
LineShine, installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, runs entirely on CPUs. Roughly 45,000 domestic LX2 processors on the LingKun platform. 304 cores each. No H100s. No A100s. No AMD. Not a single chip we tried to deny them.
The whole point of U.S. export controls — tightened from Trump through Biden and still in place today — was one bet: cut China off from Nvidia and you cap their compute ceiling.
They didn't wait for the chips. They routed around them.
And it goes deeper than silicon. The operating system is Kylin OS — domestic. The interconnect is a proprietary fabric called LingQi — domestic. Silicon, OS, networking. Every layer made in China, by China, for China.
We targeted the hardware. We targeted the toolchains. They built their own of both.
Now the fair counterpoint, because I will not oversell it: a CPU-heavy system that tops a general benchmark is not automatically a better AI training rig. GPUs still win the matrix math that LLMs live on. Huawei's Ascend line is probably doing that work somewhere the TOP500 never sees.
Fine. Grant all of it.
A machine doing 2,198 exaflops of general compute is still a serious weapon. Climate modeling. Nuclear simulation. Materials science. Cryptographic research. None of that needs a GPU. That is a national instrument, fully sovereign, that no export rule can switch off.
This is the lesson America keeps refusing to learn. You cannot sanction your way to a lead. Restrictions buy you time. They do not buy you superiority. All they did here was force a competitor to go build the entire stack itself — and now they own it end to end, with no kill switch we control.
I came to this country because America out-built everyone. Not because it out-restricted them.
Compute independence is not a press release in Shenzhen. It is happening. The only question left is whether we answer it by building faster — or by writing another memo about what we are willing to sell.
REPLACEMENT — out July 28. The whole book is about this exact collision.
What are we actually building in response?