The top 10 countries in the world by computing power

As the artificial intelligence race heats up, so does the global competition for computing power — something the boom would be impossible without.

Supercomputing, which is a type of high-performance computing, involves multiple central processing units, or CPUs, grouped into compute nodes that communicate to solve problems. This technology has been used to discover new materials for battery and chip development, in disease research, and increasingly to run AI workloads.

The U.S. is home to five of the 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world and has 173 of the leading systems worldwide, according to the 64th edition of the TOP500. These supercomputers process information at mind-boggling speeds, measured in “flops,” the number of calculations they can do each second. To put it in perspective, while modern smartphones can handle trillions of calculations per second, today’s top supercomputers work in petaflops, equal to a thousand trillion calculations every second.

And that’s not even the limit: the three most powerful supercomputers in the world — all located in the U.S. — have reached exascale computing, performing at least one quintillion calculations per second.

Here are the top 10 countries by maximum performance, measured in teraflops, or one trillion floating-point operations per second, based on the TOP500’s supercomputer rankings.