Ranked: Top Countries by Computing Power

This graphic breaks down the results of TOP500s latest supercomputer ranking (published November 2024) from a country perspective.

America Leads

The 🇺🇸 UnitedStates has the most systems in the TOP500 out of any country, with 172. It also has the highest combined value of maximum achievable performance, at 6.5M TFlops (Teraflops).

Adding to its dominance, the U.S. also has a new computing champion. ElCapitan, a cutting-edge supercomputer, has recently dethroned Frontier to claim the title of the world's fastest.

🇮🇹 Italy, Computing Powerhouse?

Italy has emerged as a globalleader in computing power, thanks to projects like Leonardo and HPC6. The latter is now Europe's most powerful supercomputer.

Microsoft also recently announced plans to invest €4.3 billion ($4.8 billion) into artificialintelligence and cloudinfrastructure in northern Italy over the next two years.

Why is 🇨🇳 China Seventh?

In the Nov. 2020 edition of the TOP500, China ranked third behind the U.S. and 🇯🇵 Japan in terms of maximum performance. It also had 214 systems in the ranking, the most out of any country.

Four years later, China is now ranked seventh, with only 63 systems making it into the TOP500. There are two possible reasons for China's decline in the ranking.

First, China may be withholding details from TOP500 for geopolitical reasons. It's largely believed that China does have exascale-class systems (exaflop = 1 quintillion operations/second) similar to the US, but is not publicizing them.

A second reason could be the impact of U.S. trade restrictions, which have limited China's access to leading chips from companies like NVIDIA or AMD.

While the exports restrictions are likely hurting China, it should be noted that its exaflop systems (Oceanlite and Tianhe-3) are using chips that were designed domestically.

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