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A hacking group is selling what it claims is a massive trove of stolen data from China’s National Supercomputing Center.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: If you’re unaware, China’s National Supercomputing Center is basically a large, government-backed supercomputer that thousands of organizations plug into when their own systems aren’t powerful enough. It runs massive, complex calculations for universities, companies, and government agencies by letting them send tasks to a centralized system built specifically for heavy workloads like AI training, climate modeling, engineering design, and advanced physics simulations. On the defense side, military-linked researchers and contractors also use it to simulate things like weapon performance, missile trajectories, radar systems, and how materials hold up under extreme conditions.

What’s going on now: First reported by NetAskari in February and now expanded on by CNN, a hacker using the alias “airborneshark1” and tied to the group FlamingChina claims to have breached China’s National Supercomputing Center and extracted 10 petabytes of data. According to those claims, the breach includes a wide range of sensitive data, like login information, internal files, and complex research tied to testing and simulations, some of it connected to military-related work. The group says the data covers multiple areas, including defense, engineering, and other scientific research, showing how many different organizations rely on the system.

The hackers have released a multi-gigabyte sample of the data as proof, which researchers say includes screenshots of internal directory structures, login credentials, and technical documents consistent with what the facility would store, as well as PDFs of reports and handbooks, radar test data, and advanced physics simulations, including renderings showing how weapons or payloads perform against specific targets and materials. They initially offered access to a smaller sample for around $3,000 in cryptocurrency before putting the full dataset up for sale to the highest bidder, with reports indicating the total asking price could reach millions of dollars. The data has also been advertised on Telegram channels, where the group claims it contains high-value research that could be useful to governments or intelligence agencies.

Experts who reviewed the sample say parts of it appear legitimate and align with the kind of work handled at a facility like this, but they also warned that the full scope of the breach has not been verified. Some have pointed out that extracting and storing 10 petabytes of data without detection would be extremely difficult, raising questions about whether the total size is being exaggerated.

As of now, Chinese authorities, including the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Cyberspace Administration of China, have not publicly acknowledged or confirmed the breach.