Announcement to first light

Across 221 systems the median gap between announcement and entering service is 7 months. The distribution matters more than the median: the slowest system in this dataset, Aurora, took 107 months: 8.9 years, and the reason is silicon that was cancelled and redesigned mid-procurement, not a building that ran late.

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Unknown
Atos
Other integrators

Each dot is one system, positioned by the year it entered service and how many months earlier it was announced. The three most frequent integrators carry a colour; the rest are neutral.

Download this chart's data (CSV) ↓

Table view: Announcement to first light

Period of first light	Systems	Median months	Longest months
1975–1979	2	21	30
1985–1989	2	39	57
1990–1994	2	29	29
1995–1999	2	61	69
2000–2004	5	46	62
2005–2009	7	10	58
2010–2014	19	10	74
2015–2019	36	7	65
2020–2024	85	6	107
2025–2029	61	5	49

How this was calculated

Lag is the whole number of months from announced_date to first_operational_date, both of which are sourced fields on the system row. All 1345 systems in this dataset carry both dates, so nothing is excluded here for missing data.

“Announced” is the earliest public statement of intent we hold a source for, typically a programme announcement or a contract award, whichever came first. That definition is the weak point of this chart: announcement practice is not consistent across three decades or across countries, and a laboratory that announces at contract signature will look faster than one that announces at programme approval for the same real schedule. Treat the era-over-era trend as more reliable than any individual dot.

The integrator is the supplier filling the integrator role, rolled up to today's parent, so Cray-built systems appear under HPE. Colour is capped at three groups because a dot plot compares every pair of series at once, and the categorical palette clears the colour-blindness floors for three simultaneous hues but not for eight. The remaining integrators share a neutral tone and are identified in the tooltip and the table rather than by colour.

The read

The lag has grown, and the growth is not evenly distributed. Early systems were announced close to delivery because they were built from parts that already existed. The modern exascale procurements commit to silicon that has not been fabricated yet, which converts a delivery schedule into a bet on a vendor's roadmap.

Aurora is the extreme case and worth stating plainly, because it is the data point most responsible for the shape of this chart. It was contracted in 2015 around a Xeon Phi design, that line was cancelled, the system was redesigned around Ponte Vecchio, and it entered service in 2023. That is a vendor-execution story. The site was ready long before the parts were.

The counter-example is in the same table: the systems built from parts that already shipped in volume (the academic Dell and Lenovo clusters, the DGX deployments) cluster well below the median. The trade is visible here as a number. Committing to unreleased silicon buys leadership performance and costs years of schedule risk, and which of those a buyer should want depends entirely on whether they need the top of the list or need the machine.

By integrator

Integrators with at least two systems in the dataset. Small samples: these are medians over a handful of machines each, not a vendor scorecard.

Integrator (today's parent)	Systems	Median months	Range
IBM	12	35	0–53
NUDT	2	32	22–41
Intel	2	29	4–53
Thinking Machines	2	25	20–29
MEGWARE	2	16	14–17
Hewlett Packard Enterprise	59	14	0–107
Fujitsu	8	14	4–77
Amazon	4	14	10–28
NEC	4	10	5–62
Lenovo	9	10	0–20
Penguin Computing	2	10	0–19
Atos	16	8	0–46
Cerebras	3	6	0–8
Dell Technologies	14	6	0–17
Unknown	19	5	0–23
Supermicro	3	5	0–9
Huawei	5	5	0–7
Microsoft	2	5	0–10
NVIDIA	14	4	0–11
Preferred Networks	2	4	4–4
Nscale	2	4	3–5
Nebius	2	4	2–5
CoreWeave	2	3	0–5
Alibaba Group	2	0	0–0
Meta Platforms	2	0	0–0

Longest gaps

System	Announced	First operational	Months	Integrator
Aurora	2015	2023-12	107	Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Fugaku	2014	2020-06	77	Fujitsu
Blue Waters	2007	2013-03	74	Hewlett Packard Enterprise
El Capitan	2019	2024-11	70	Hewlett Packard Enterprise
CP-PACS	1991	1996-10	69	Hitachi