The key factor is that US cloud systems are not being included in supercomputing calculations at all. The most powerful supercomputers are Amazon's AWS or Google's systems. Alibaba's cloud systems are still tiny by comparison.
Cloud compute systems are the next evolution of supercomputing. Or put a better way, the traditional supercomputers being measured, are history.
It'd be like holding up 56k modem market leadership today as a sign of technological dominance.
Indeed much scientific computing these days is "high-throughput" rather than "high-performance" computing [1], and is done on commodity hardware, including commercial clouds. However there are certain classes of problems that still need highly-connected leadership systems [2,3], but that distinction is definitely blurring.
High performance computing (HPC) is a specific field. Fast communication between compute nodes is very important and you won't get that on GCP or AWS where you may get 10gbs at the max. Most of the fast simulation codes are bounded by communication time between nodes.
Although, Azure is currently doing some HPC offerings.
The point of the chart is that the rise in China's tech capabilities is quite broad-based. The tagline about supercomputers is just an illustration for non-tech readers.
Quantum communications and certain NLP applications/technologies are some areas that China has likely surpassed the US. These are definitely not comparable to 56k modem.
There's zero evidence China has surpassed the US in quantum. In fact all the evidence is that the US is leading quantum by a significant margin, from IBM to Microsoft to Google. Your NLP reference is meaninglessly vague.
Traditional supercomputers, except in isolated use cases, are a thing of the past. Nearly all supercomputing work will be done in the cloud in the not very distant future, supercomputing will continue to shrink.
China's use of supercomputing is because on the whole they're still a decade behind on adopting cloud computing (which is why Alibaba, their leader in the segment, has such a small business compared to the US cloud giants).
For real-world NLP: Xiaoyi (Little Doctor) was the first (and currently the only) AI that passed a medical licensing exam that human doctors need to pass (and rote learning is not enough to pass): http://sites.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/12/02/congrats-x...
Cloud compute systems are the next evolution of supercomputing. Or put a better way, the traditional supercomputers being measured, are history.
It'd be like holding up 56k modem market leadership today as a sign of technological dominance.