The funny thing is that Asia is becoming more and more the source of the world’s innovation; in what seems like a game of “anything you can do, I can do better,” Asian nations are claiming technological achievements left and right that were once dominated by the west.

Just a few days ago, for example, a Chinese scientific research center in the northern coastal city of Tianjin unveiled the fastest supercomputer in the world. Known as the Tianhe-1A, it is able to calculate instructions at least 40% faster than its nearest competitor in Tennessee.

The reason that the Chinese supercomputer is so much faster isn’t because they just jammed more chips onto the circuit boards… rather, they innovated. Engineers at Tianjin’s National University of Defense Technology developed a new way of connecting powerful minicomputers together which collectively share calculations.

It’s a model that hasn’t been used before and was developed exclusively by Chinese engineers. Though the machine uses processors designed by Intel and Nvidia (US companies), China is already in the works to develop its own chips, fully eliminating reliance on US technology.