FPI / May 8, 2025
Geostrategy-Direct
The U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Energy have funded laboratories at American universities which in their research used Chinese supercomputers that have contributed to the communist nation's military buildup.
L.J. Eads, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst, said the obvious: Such practices endangers national security.
The supercomputer centers are linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and other official Chinese ministries and institutes that are on the U.S. Commerce Department’s blacklist of foreign companies.
The systems “serve as critical infrastructure for the PLA and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in advancing military technology, hypersonic weapons and AI-driven defense capabilities,” Eads told The Washington Times.
Key Pentagon entities involved in the Chinese supercomputer use include the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Air Force Material Command, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Laboratory, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Eads uncovered the links in research from over 100 scientific studies between 2016 and 2024. The studies revealed that American researchers were using China’s TianHe-series supercomputers located in Tianjin and Guangzhou.
The systems are part of the Chinese national supercomputer center and were used in papers produced by researchers at Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos National Laboratories. The laboratories are involved in sensitive U.S. defense work, including nuclear weapons.
Pentagon-funded research at several prestigious universities also used Chinese supercomputers. The report listed seven examples of defense-related collaboration using Chinese supercomputers.
In one 2024 case, researchers from MIT worked with Chinese researchers at Peking University on hydrogen production techniques. The dual-use civilian and military research was funded by the U.S. Army.
“The CCP’s comparative advantage is surveillance, not science or fundamental research,” Jacqueline Deal, an advisory board member at State Armor, a nonprofit focused on countering the CCP, told The Daily Caller.
“The Party has wired its universities and overseas research institutions in order to sense and detect work with military or intelligence applications. There’s no such thing as harmless cooperation on dual-use topics with people subject to the reach of China’s surveillance apparatus.”
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