In 2015, plans by Sun Yat-sen University in collaboration with Guangzhou district and city administration to double its computing capacities were stopped by a U.S. government rejection of Intel's application for an export license for the CPUs and coprocessor boards.

[6][7][8] In response to the U.S. sanctions, China introduced the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in 2016, which substantially outperforms the Tianhe-2 (and also affected the update of Tianhe-2 to Tianhe-2A, replacing U.S. tech), and in November 2022 ranks eighth in the TOP500 list while using completely domestic technology including the Sunway manycore microprocessor.

[1] It was built by China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in collaboration with the Chinese IT firm Inspur.

[1][5] Inspur manufactured the printed circuit boards and helped with the installation and testing of the system software.

Tianhe-2's performance returned the title of the world's fastest supercomputer to China after Tianhe-I's début in November 2010.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers said Tianhe-2's win "symbolizes China's unflinching commitment to the supercomputing arms race".

[1] The front-end system consisted of 4096 Galaxy FT-1500 CPUs, a SPARC derivative designed and built by NUDT.

The interconnect, called the TH Express-2, designed by NUDT, utilized a fat tree topology with 13 switches each of 576 ports.

"It is at the world's frontier in terms of calculation capacity, but the functionality of the supercomputer is still way behind the ones in the US and Japan", says Chi Xuebin, deputy director of the Computer Network and Information Centre.