AMD comes out on top, HPE, Dell, Nvidia do well
The biannual release of the Top500 list of supercomputers worldwide is populated with supercomputers at research institutions, not private industry, and is a source of bragging rights for the vendors who make a strong showing.
Quite a bit changed in the 31 years since the list was created. Back in 1994, the list was dominated by Thinking Machines supercomputers, made famous in the movie “Jurassic Park,” and all the processors were custom RISC designs without a single x86 to be had. Now it’s all x86.
Hopefully you have already seen our top 10 list coverage, but here’s a deeper dive into the specifics of the list and who came out on top and in what way. All comparisons are between the lists from November of 2024 and November of 2025.
Winners: HPE, Dell, & Nvidia (servers)
These three gained the newest servers from the November 2024 list. HPE gained 10 new systems over the year, from 116 in 2024 to 126 in 2025, Dell picking up 8 over the year, from 37 to 45, and Nvidia picking up 6 new systems, from 31 to 37 in the space of a year.
Loser: Lenovo
Lenovo was big, dropping 20 systems in the space of a year, from 161 in 2024 to 141 in 2025. Lenovo was dominant in China, and China lost a little momentum on this list as other nations came on strong, particularly Canada.
Winner: Nvidia Grace/Arm
In the space of one year, Nvidia’s Grace processor, built on the Arm architecture, has gone from zero deployments to 18, finally giving Arm some representation on the list.
Winner: Slingshot-11
Slingshot-11 is a 200G proprietary interconnect developed by HPE and its Cray supercomputer subsidiary. As the number of Cray systems increases on the list, so goes the number of Slingshot-11 based systems. The total number of Slingshot-11 systems jumped from 37 and 2024 to 52 this year.
Loser: Ethernet
I want to preface this by adding the caveat that a third of all networking is lumped into the amorphous “other” category, making a complete picture of difficult to obtain. That said, Ethernet is falling out of favor has an interconnect for HPC.
First, despite all the hype and hubbub and enthusiasm around 400G and 800G Ethernet, 25G and 100G are the only two break-out Ethernet ports on the list. On the November 2025 list, 25G and 100G Ethernet accounted for 78 systems. One year earlier, 10G, 25G and 100G accounted for 132 systems total.
Winner: Intel
Among the CPU processor generations, the new Xeon 6, AKA Sapphire Rapids, which debuted earlier this year and thus didn’t make a showing on the 2024 list, now powers 73 systems, surpassing the AMD Zen 3 (Milan) architecture for the most widely deployed CPU architecture.
Loser: AMD
Despite having two of the top three supercomputers using its GPU accelerator and the fact that Instinct is on par with the best from Nvidia, AMD is really getting no traction with its Instinct line. It went from 12 systems in 2024 to 14 systems in 2025, and that was with the older MI250X cards, which have since been replaced by the 300 generation.
Things weren’t much better on the processor side. The Zen 2 through Zen 4 architectures collectively accounted for 162 systems in 2024 and 164 systems in 2025 for a gain of two.
