China-US Tech War Reaches Its Peak As Chinese Supercomputer Gets Top Slot In 2026

The U.S.-China high tech battle for supremacy has reached a new peak after the China manufactured Supercomputer LineShine was adjudged the best among the Top 500 supercomputers made by various nations including the USA, at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany held on June 23.China got this top slot recognition after 2017- a gap of nine years.

The announcement by the international body has sent tremors to the U.S. high tech companies and the Pentagon. They have been mobilizing huge financial resources for manufacturing more and more technologically developed Supercomputer. US is still ahead of China in high tech war, but this latest feat of China has bridged the gap between the two super powers making Trump’s bargaining power on high tech vis a vis China more problematic. The top computer experts of USA have been assessing the arrival of Chinese LineShine and its impact on the high-tech industries.

The LineShine supercomputer has two technical features. First, LineShine was researched and developed entirely domestically and independently. Faced with years of export controls on high-end GPUs and advanced chip equipment targeting China, Chinese research teams have established a complete closed-loop process – from chip design to system integration – truly achieving self-reliance and control. That means LineShine took first place despite facing layer upon layer of restrictions.

Second, while most of today’s leading supercomputers rely heavily on GPUs, LineShine is the first supercomputer to achieve exascale performance using only CPUs, and it is approximately 20 percent faster than El Capitan, the US supercomputer that previously held the top spot. The even greater significance of LineShine reaching the top lies in the fact that it has validated the feasibility of a complete domestic technology stack, including domestically made chips, storage, interconnects, and cooling systems. Prior to this, no country had ever built the world’s top supercomputer without relying entirely on products from AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA.

According to Chinese experts, Chinese supercomputer’s return to the global top not only demonstrates the country’s increasingly robust self-reliance and control in the high-tech sector, but also offers new options and greater opportunities for global industrial development. Today, fields such as atmospheric and oceanic sciences, engineering simulation, materials science, drug discovery, brain science, scientific AI, and large language model inference all rely on powerful supercomputing support.

According to Chinese experts, for a long time, high-end computing resources have been highly concentrated in a few Western countries. Many developing nations lack the capacity to build their own supercomputing systems and can only passively accept a single source of technology and stringent access restrictions. The path China has taken in computing power provides a model for countries in the Global South – one that is free from external control and allows for autonomous innovation.

Chinese official media mentions in recent years, China’s technological innovation has advanced rapidly, with many sectors accelerating the transition from quantitative growth to qualitative breakthroughs, from the low and mid-range to the mid- and high-end, and from being followers to leaders. China’s ranking in the Global Innovation Index rose from 34th place in 2012 to 10th in 2025. China will not close the door to international cooperation because it has achieved technological leadership, nor will it abandon its commitment to independent innovation because of external restrictions.

As far as U.S. experts are concerned, they hold the view that US-China tech war has intensified dramatically since 2017, employing a full spectrum of measures from tariffs and export controls to restrictions on market access in a race for technological dominance that is reshaping the global electronics landscape. While our calculations indicate a substantial shift in US imports away from China that has cost the latter close to USD150 billion in lost exports since 2017, they also suggest that underlying, mutual interdependence remains deeply rooted in the very structure of the industry: 29% of US semiconductor manufacturing machinery exports flow to China, and US electronics imports from Mexico, Taiwan and Vietnam incorporate a great deal of Chinese value-added.

I As they see it, if the ties connecting the US and Chinese electronics industries have proven more resilient than what headline bilateral trade figures might suggest, it is largely because the US administration’s long-term drive to cut ties with China contradicts the short-term interests of corporate America and the world’s most dominant electronics companies. We estimate that over the last decade US companies alone accounted for 54% of global electronics profits, a share that balloons to 88% when including their Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese peers.

Meanwhile, despite surging sales and remarkable technological progress, Chinese companies only secured 7% of global industry profits and are still lagging far behind leaders in the all-strategic semiconductor segment (Chart 3). A major supplier of critical inputs, an unmatched manufacturing hub and one of the world’s largest consumer markets for electronics, China resembles more a condition for, rather than a threat to, the profitability of dominant US electronics companies.

A study released in June by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that industrial firms in China had received three to eight times as much government support over the past two decades as companies in the 38 mostly wealthy nations that belong to the O.E.C.D. In a report last month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Rhodium Group argued that Chinese industrial policy was becoming more pervasive and systemic, calling the strategy an “industrial policy of everything.”

The U.S. experts argue that China’s advances are fuelled by investments in research, education and talent, policies that the United States should do more to emulate. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, said in March that one of Pfizer’s biggest challenges was how to tap into the “meteoric rise” of China’s scientific abilities in the midst of geopolitical tensions.

Mr. Bourla predicted that China would surpass the United States in biopharmaceutical innovation within this decade, saying the country had carried out a strategic plan over decades to reform regulations, file patents, fund research and cultivate talent. “They built their science. So this is where we need to become better,” Mr. Bourla said.

That way, the Chinese attack on U.S. supremacy in high tech areas covers not just supercomputers and electronics but also biopharmaceuticals. The U.S. multinationals are worried. The low cost production base of the Chinese companies has posed a big threat to the big U.S. firms. They have to compete on an equal footing. After the latest Supercomputer announcement, a frenzy has gripped the U.S. companies as also the Trump administration. The battle for supremacy in high tech has entered more intense and decisive phase. (IPA Service)