AMD-based supercomputers claim gold and silver in latest Top500 rankings while Chinese HPC capabilities remain opaque.

Top500.org released its 65th list of the world's most powerful supercomputers on Tuesday, revealing the continued dominance of AMD-based systems and a notable absence of new entries from China. The top three exascale-class systems are all operated by U.S. Department of Energy laboratories: AMD Instinct MI300A-based El Capitan leads with Rmax performance of 1.7 FP64 ExaFLOPS, followed by the AMD-powered Frontier with 1.353 ExaFLOPS and Intel-based Aurora with 1.012 ExaFLOPS. Germany's Jupiter Booster, based on Nvidia's GH200 platform, claims the fourth position with 0.793 ExaFLOPS, while Microsoft's Eagle rounds out the top five at 0.561 ExaFLOPS.

El Capitan, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, achieves 1.742 ExaFLOPS on the HPL benchmark using AMD's fourth-generation EPYC processors and Instinct MI300A accelerators within an HPE Cray EX255a framework. The system comprises over 11 million cores and uses the HPE Slingshot interconnect. El Capitan topped the companion High Performance Conjugate Gradients benchmark with 17.1 PetaFLOPS and the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark with 16.7 ExaFLOPS, standing at 58.9 GigaFLOPS per watt for energy efficiency. Frontier, installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, achieved 1.353 ExaFLOPS using AMD's third-generation EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct 250X accelerators with over 8.6 million cores, ranking third in the HPCG benchmark at 14.05 petaflops with energy efficiency of 54.98 GigaFLOPS per watt. Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois recorded 1.012 ExaFLOPS on the HPL benchmark using Intel Xeon CPU Max and Data Center GPU Max components, securing second place in the HPL-MxP benchmark with 11.6 ExaFLOPS.

Jupiter Booster at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany reaches 793.4 PFLOPS in HPL using Nvidia Grace Hopper hardware on Eviden's BullSequana XH3000 platform with direct liquid cooling and HP's Slingshot networking. Microsoft Azure's Eagle system in fifth place achieves 561 PFLOPS using Xeon Platinum 8480C processors and Nvidia H100 GPUs. Analysis of the June 2025 Top 500 list reveals that Intel processors power 294 of the 500 systems, with AMD following at 173 supercomputers, Nvidia appearing in 13 entries, nine systems based on other Arm processors such as Fujitsu's A64FX, and six systems using other processor types including IBM Power9 and China's Sunway architecture.

The U.S. extended its numerical lead with 175 systems in the latest rankings, while China continued its downward trend with 47 systems, no longer submitting results of its latest systems to Top500.org. Germany maintained 41 machines in the Top 500 list. On the energy efficiency front, Germany's JEDI system leads globally with 72.73 GigaFLOPS per watt, followed by France's ROMEO-2025 at 70.91 and Adastra 2 at 69.1, all three using BullSequana XH3000 infrastructure, while El Capitan and Frontier ranked 26th and below on energy efficiency, reflecting a different balance between raw performance and efficiency.