China has eclipsed its own – and the US – record, building a monster underground hypergravity centrifuge that can model scenarios with 1,900 times the real-world gravitational force of Earth, bending space and time with unprecedented power.
Built by Shanghai Electric Nuclear Power Group as part of China's Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF), CHIEF1900 will soon function at 1,900 g-tonnes, surpassing the previously most powerful centrifuge the CHIEF1300.
“We aim to create experimental environments that span milliseconds to tens of thousands of years, and atomic to [kilometer] scales – under normal or extreme conditions of temperature and pressure,” Chen Yunmin, CHIEF’s chief scientist and a professor at Zhejiang University, told South China Morning Post. “It gives us the chance to discover entirely new phenomena or theories."
We first reported on the facility in 2024, when the scale of the project was unveiled, but with only the preliminary machinery in place. The impressive CHIEF1300 came online in September 2025, with the ability to generate up to 1,300 g-tonnes of hypergravity. The new centrifuge is about 46% more extreme in its capacity.
Both centrifuges are used to model intense gravity to compress time and scale in experiments – which essentially lets scientists simulate long-term or large-scale physical phenomena such as dam structural integrity, earthquake damage, landslides, nuclear waste storage and more.
By increasing effective gravity, researchers can accelerate years or even decades of structural and geological stress into just a few hours, enabling experiments that would be impractical in the real world.
The CHIEF1900 has been installed 49 feet (15 m) below Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, in order to reduce the vibrational disturbance it'd cause if contained in an above-ground facility. Meanwhile, a vacuum-based coolant and air ventilation circulation system offsets the intense heat generated by the centrifuges operating at high speeds.
The hypergravity facility is reported to have cost around US$285 million to build and is expected to be a beacon of international research, with the Chinese team inviting scientists from around the world to use the technology.
The CHIEF1900 is yet to begin conducting experiments, but it's expected to be operational soon.
Source: South China Morning Post
