Against the backdrop of global discussions about whether China is experiencing a deficit or surplus of computing power, China's semiconductor center in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, presents a clearer picture: stable and universal computing power remains in acute shortage, with orders for certain chips scheduled for next year and beyond.
Sun Guolian, Product Director at the GPU manufacturer MetaX (MXC series), noted that the shortage is observed regarding universal and reliable computing power. However, there is a surplus in non-universal architectures that can only operate with outdated or highly specialized models. Chips from this company's MXC600 series are supplied in large batches, and next-generation product development is in advanced stages.
Parallel to traditional electronic computing, Zhangjiang positions itself as China's national silicon photonics center. The Shanghai Zhangjiang silicon photonics cluster now unites over twenty companies covering the entire production cycle. Among them stands Lightelligence—the world's first company producing AI silicon photonic chips, which has been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Shen Yichen, founder of Lightelligence, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has previously published in the journal Nature, forecasts that silicon photonic chips will account for over 30% of the intelligent computing center market within five years, compared to less than 3% today. The company has already implemented hybrid optoelectronic solutions in three optical interconnect clusters of a thousand cards, enabling the operation of over 5000 GPUs for 44 corporate clients, including research institutions, internet companies, GPU manufacturers, and AI infrastructure operators.
The Zhangjiang 895 incubator has attracted several developing photonic startups, such as Qisuan Guangqi, specializing in optical chip R&D, and Guangjiu Technology, focusing on photonic technologies. The cluster also includes JCET (Changdian Technology) for advanced packaging and Suzhou Yite for silicon photonics testing, ensuring full coverage of the chain from design to testing.
The Zhangjiang model represents a dual approach to solving China's computing power problem: developing traditional electronic computing to ensure universal reliability while simultaneously creating a silicon photonics ecosystem. This ecosystem potentially offers a breakthrough in optical interconnects, allowing thousands of GPUs to function as efficiently as one chip by transmitting data via optical rather than electrical channels.
The domestic supercomputer Lingsheng, developed in China, has regained its top spot in the global TOP500 list, achieving a sustained double-precision floating-point performance of 2.19 EFLOPS. This news was announced at the ISC 2026 High-Performance Computing Conference held in Hamburg, Germany, on June 23rd. China's return to the top of the global supercomputing ranking comes after a nine-year hiatus.
The Lingsheng system is built entirely using domestic Chinese processors and components. This marks a significant milestone in China's pursuit of technological self-sufficiency amid ongoing US export restrictions on advanced computing technologies. The performance breakthrough demonstrates that chips designed domestically are capable of competing at the highest level of scientific computing, handling the most demanding tasks in artificial intelligence training, climate modeling, and fundamental research.
In connection with this ranking, an interview was conducted with Turing Award laureate Jack J. Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee, who created the LINPACK benchmark used for the TOP500 evaluation. Dongarra noted that China stopped providing data for the benchmark in recent years due to US technology export controls, which led to a gradual decline in its ranking over the past three years. He stated: 'China has already built quite powerful computers,' adding that despite the cessation of official data submissions, publicly available scientific papers detail the architectures and capabilities of Chinese supercomputers, ensuring sufficient transparency for the global HPC community.
The TOP500 list, maintained for 34 years since 1993, ranks supercomputers based on their performance on the LINPACK benchmark—the standard for measuring floating-point computing capabilities. Dongarra emphasized that global competition remains fierce, as nations view high-end supercomputers as critical scientific infrastructure comparable to large telescopes or particle accelerators. Such infrastructure allows for the attraction of leading scientists and the conduct of breakthrough research.
China's return to the first place signals the effectiveness of the strategy for developing domestic chips and the continuous viability of the high-performance computing ecosystem. This has profound implications for AI training, climatology, drug discovery, materials modeling, and other computationally intensive fields that determine national competitiveness.
