According to Network World, Nvidia’s first exascale supercomputer has arrived with Germany’s JUPITER Booster system hitting exactly 1 exaflop performance and earning the fourth spot on the November 2025 TOP500 list. The system uses Nvidia’s GH200 superchip combining two Hopper GPUs with ARM-based CPUs connected via NVLink technology providing 900GB/s bandwidth. JUPITER becomes the world’s fourth exascale system behind three U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers: El Capitan (1.8 exaflops), Frontier (1.35 exaflops), and Aurora (1.01 exaflops). The achievement marks Nvidia’s entry into the exascale club while seven of the top ten systems still use traditional x86 architecture from AMD and Intel. JUPITER was assembled by France-based Eviden and initially appeared on the list at 793 petaflops before its final construction barely pushed it past the 1 exaflop milestone.
The architecture shift happening now
Here’s what’s really interesting about this development. We’re watching a fundamental architecture battle play out in real time. For decades, x86 from Intel and AMD completely dominated supercomputing. Now Nvidia is coming in with ARM-based Grace CPUs paired with their powerhouse GPUs. The JUPITER Booster specifically uses what Nvidia calls the GH200 superchip, which basically links two Hopper GPUs with ARM-based CPUs using their proprietary NVLink interconnect.
But here’s the thing – does the traditional TOP500 benchmark even matter anymore? The list measures conventional computing performance using FP64 floating point, not the lower precision data types that AI workloads actually use. That’s why Microsoft’s Eagle system, which drives their AI infrastructure and ranks fifth, isn’t even designed for conventional computing. It’s built for AI work, not topping these particular charts.
The AI performance reality check
This gets to the heart of why many experts are questioning the relevance of these rankings. When you look at the emerging HPL-MxP benchmark that measures AI performance, the numbers look completely different. El Capitan jumps from 1.8 exaflops to 16.7 exaflops, and Aurora goes from 1.01 to 11.6 exaflops. That’s a massive difference that reflects what these systems are actually being used for today.
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What the global landscape really looks like
There’s another huge elephant in the room that the TOP500 list doesn’t show. China stopped reporting its supercomputers in 2023, as noted in a Federal Reserve research paper. So we have no idea what systems they’re running or how they compare. Given the trade wars and chip export bans, China has become increasingly secretive about its supercomputing capabilities.
Meanwhile, Japan’s RIKEN is developing FugakuNEXT with Fujitsu’s ARM-based Monaka CPU and Nvidia GPUs, scheduled for 2030. This system is explicitly designed for AI from the ground up, unlike its predecessor that currently ranks seventh. The U.S. Department of Energy is also prioritizing AI and energy efficiency in its next-generation systems.
Why energy efficiency might matter more
Speaking of efficiency, eight of the top spots on the Green500 list went to systems with Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs, with two AMD Instinct MI300A systems rounding out the top ten. That efficiency piece is becoming increasingly crucial as these systems consume massive amounts of power.
So where does this leave us? El Capitan is expected to hold the top spot for years with no new exascale systems immediately on the horizon. But the real story isn’t about who’s number one – it’s about the fundamental shift toward AI-optimized architectures and the quiet competition happening behind the scenes that we can’t even measure properly. The supercomputing race has become as much about what we don’t know as what we do.
