China bypasses US GPU bans with 1.54-exaflops 'LineShine' supercomputer — CPU-only monster packs 2.4 million Huawei-designed Armv9 cores

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https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/china-bypasses-us-gpu-bans-with-1-54-exaflops-lineshine-supercomputer-cpu-only-monster-packs-2-4-million-huawei-designed-armv9-cores

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The original was posted on /r/technology by /u/Steap-Edit on 2026-05-18 01:20:44+00:00.

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These are super computers for HPC, not “AI model training”. The link inside is saying it’s using AI to do quantum chemistry, not developing AI itself.

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Which is an even bigger let-down, because that means its entire purpose is to approximate quantum computing slightly better than other classical simulators, all of which are fundamentally incapable of quantum simulation.

Background: ML can lend a higher degree of realism to QC simulation, which can be useful for experiment development due to the expense of real quantum compute time but with a lot of asterisks relating to accuracy.

Ultimately since real QC is non-negotiable for modern quantum chemistry, this super computer was likely built as a cost-saving measure that would only be justified by a lack of funding and/or affordable access to QC.

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By comparison, xAI’s supercomputer capacity isn’t public but is estimated to be around 500 exaflops.

Edit: And that’s just fucking X of all companies so imagine what an actual serious company like Google or Microsoft could have cooked up.

So while this is impressive, going CPU-only has probably resulted in a computer which costs an order of magnitude more while performing an order of magnitude less.

There is a reason the GPU architecture is still king in this aspect.

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I feel threatened.

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