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China’s Lineshine Tops TOP500, Beats El Capitan

The Lineshine supercomputer, installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, is the fastest publicly reported supercomputer in the world according to the latest TOP500 list presented at the ISC Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg. Lineshine achieved 2.198 exaflops on the standardized benchmark, surpassing the US-based El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which recorded 1.809 exaflops. The TOP500 ranking, published twice yearly, orders systems by a single unified performance test and highlights ongoing global competition in high-performance computing. Other leading systems on the list include Frontier and Aurora (USA), with Germany’s Jupiter Booster (Forschungszentrum Jülich) at fifth place.

Google allows Gmail address changes in Germany

Google has begun rolling out a feature that lets Gmail users change the local part of their email address (the part before “@gmail.com”), a capability that was first launched in the United States and is now being made available in Germany. The original address remains active as an alternative and cannot be permanently removed without deleting the entire Google account. Users can maintain up to four Gmail addresses per account (the original plus three alternatives) and may change the address only once per year. Some Google-linked services still require the previous address for login, while Google services such as YouTube accept the new address. Chromebook users must remove the old account from the device and add the new one manually and are advised to back up local data beforehand.

Europe 2031: Downfall Scenario Sparks Debate

A Brussels-based think‑tank published a speculative scenario called “Europe 2031” that imagines Europe’s economy in ruins by 2031 while the US and China dominate global technology and industry. The scenario builds on developments in 2025–2026 — notably the Chinese model Deepseek R1, limited gains from GPT‑5, and US restrictions on access to Anthropic’s Fable — and extrapolates a widening European lag in AI compute, cybersecurity and industrial competitiveness. In the scenario, foreign firms buy up European industry and political pressure forces a potential sale of ASML. The authors urge large-scale investment in European AI infrastructure, removal of regulatory bottlenecks, and heavy investment in robotics/“Physical AI” to avoid the outcome. The article questions the plausibility of the scenario and examines its underlying assumptions.