Engineering benefits humanity, and technology creates the future. On October 13, 2025, the Global Top Ten Engineering Achievements 2025, selected by the Chinese Academy of Engineering’s flagship journal Engineering, were officially released at the World Federation of Engineering Organizations 2025 General Assembly, jointly organized by the World Federation of Engineering Organizations, China Association for Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Shanghai Municipal People’s Government.
To showcase the power of engineering and anchor innovation, the journal
Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering’s Global Engineering Front Research Project have jointly organized the annual Global Top Ten Engineering Achievements selection since 2021 [[
1], [
2], [
3], [
4]]. This initiative aims to attract public attention to engineering innovation and foster an atmosphere of respect for engineering and celebration of creativity. The Global Top Ten Engineering Achievements 2025 were selected through global nominations, expert recommendations, public surveys, and a final review by the selection committee. The projects honored here are major innovative engineering achievements completed in the past five years that have been validated by practice and have a global impact. Each project is introduced below.
1. The Perseverance rover
On February 19, 2021, the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on Mars—an event marking the fifth rover successfully deployed to Mars by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Integrating multiple cutting-edge technologies, including autonomous navigation, sample collection, and extraterrestrial exploration, Perseverance achieved highly complex autonomous operations and multi-agency collaborative exploration. It successfully collected Martian core and dust samples and completed the Mars atmospheric oxygen-generation experiment. Moreover, the Ingenuity helicopter—the world’s first extraterrestrial helicopter carried by a rover—carried out experimental flights in the low-density atmospheric environment of Mars. The Perseverance Mars rover starts a new chapter in humanity’s systematic exploration of the possibilities of extraterrestrial life in the universe [
5].
2. The Euclid space telescope
On July 1, 2023, the Euclid space telescope, a deep-space exploration mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA), was launched into space. Euclid was deployed at the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point L2, 1.5 × 10
6 km away from Earth, and orbits this point in an orbit with a radius of 400 000 to 800 000 km and a period of approximately six months. The telescope observes galaxies 10 billion light-years away from Earth, capturing information about the evolution of galaxies in the early Universe. The first batch of scientific results already released by the Euclid space telescope has revealed a host of unprecedented cosmic wonders, providing key clues for research on cosmic dark matter and dark energy and representing a significant breakthrough in the history of humanity’s deep-space exploration [
6].
3. The full-ocean-depth manned submersible
In May 2019, the United States full-ocean-depth manned submersible
Limiting Factor successfully reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, achieving a dive depth of 10 925 m and setting a new record for humanity’s deepest descent to the Earth’s lowest point. As key technological equipment for deep-sea access, exploration, development, and protection, full-ocean-depth manned submersibles hold enormous application potential in fields such as deep-sea resource exploration and abyssal scientific research. The United States, China, France, Japan, and Russia have all made progress in the development of full-ocean-depth manned submersibles, providing crucial support for humanity’s exploration of the mysteries of the Earth’s deep seas [
7].
4. The China’s South-to-North Water Transfer Middle Route Project
On August 25, 2022, China’s South-to-North Water Transfer Middle Route Project—a key component of China’s national inter-basin water transfer project—was fully commissioned. Drawing water from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in Hubei Province, the Middle Route runs through Henan and Hebei Provinces before reaching Beijing and Tianjin. With a total main canal length of 1432 km, it features a high-south and low-north topographical gradient, adopting various water-conveyance forms such as open canals, aqueducts, covered culverts, and tunnels to achieve gravity flow throughout the entire water transfer process. While optimizing water resource allocation and ensuring drinking water safety, China’s South-to-North Water Transfer Middle Route Project effectively promotes the ecological restoration and sustainable development of rivers and lakes along the route, providing a replicable solution for global water resource allocation and ecological optimization [
8].
5. The Taklimakan Desert Edge-Locking Project
On November 28, 2024, closure of the Taklimakan Desert Edge-Locking Project—a landmark project in China’s “Three-North” Shelterbelt Forest Program—was successfully achieved. With a total length of 3046 km, the project comprehensively adopts various measures including afforestation, grassland construction, engineering sand fixation, and photovoltaic sand control. It overcomes the constraints posed by extreme environments such as aridity and water scarcity, as well as intense wind and sand activity, and solves a series of technical challenges including wind-sand corridors, complex terrain, and difficult site conditions. As the world’s longest green ecological barrier circling a desert, the project controls the outward spread of sand sources and reverses the millennium-old trend of deserts advancing and humans retreating, providing a new model for global desertification control and regional sustainable development.
6. Blackwell GPU architecture
In March 2024, Nvidia Corporation in the United States released Blackwell, a new-generation graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture. As an advanced computing architecture specifically designed to address the complex computational requirements of the artificial intelligence (AI) inference phase, the Blackwell architecture is composed of mixed-precision computing power, tensor cores, and high-bandwidth memory. Through technologies such as the high-density design of 208 billion transistors, floating point 4-bit (FP4) low-precision computing, and fifth-generation NVLink high-speed interconnection, it achieves exponential growth in computing power and a significant reduction in energy consumption. The Blackwell architecture greatly increases AI training speed, reduces inference latency to seconds, significantly lowers the computational threshold for ultra-large models, and facilitates the entrance of large-model AI to the era of trillion-parameter computing [
9].
7. The open-source large language model DeepSeek
From December 2024 to January 2025, DeepSeek, a Chinese AI start-up, successively released two open-source large models, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1. Through systematic innovations in model algorithms and engineering optimization, DeepSeek has blazed a new trail for the exploration of general AI under resource-constrained conditions. With its leading model performance, open and shared architecture system, and rapid engineering implementation capabilities, DeepSeek has become one of the fastest-growing AI applications globally. The large language models represented by DeepSeek, which feature high performance, strong openness, and low cost, have greatly accelerated the process of AI popularization, reshaped the global AI ecosystem, and promoted the acceleration of all industries toward intelligence [
10].
8. High-performance carbon fiber composites
High-performance carbon fiber composite materials are high-performance structural materials made through composite processes, with carbon fiber as the reinforcement and resin, metal, or ceramics as the matrix. Boasting characteristics such as a light weight, high strength, high temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, and strong designability, these materials are widely applied in high-end manufacturing fields, including aerospace, energy, transportation, and sports equipment, and are hailed as the “black gold” of modern industry. Enterprises such as Japan’s Toray Industries, the United States’ Hexcel Corporation, and Germany’s SGL Carbon are accelerating technological innovation and continuously breaking through the limits of carbon fiber’s mechanical properties. High-performance carbon fiber composite materials are quietly transforming the familiar material world, ushering in a new era of material revolution.
9. Humanoid robots
The first World Humanoid Robot Games were held in Beijing, China, in August 2025. As innovative carriers of the deep integration of AI and robot technology, humanoid robots have “limb” structures, movement patterns, and perception methods similar to those of humans and possess the ability to learn and make decisions independently. They can replace or assist humans in completing tasks in various scenarios such as industrial manufacturing, rehabilitation medicine, and special operations. From Tesla’s Optimus to Unitree Robotics’s G1, Figure AI’s Figure 02, and other products, the global humanoid robot industry is accelerating its commercial implementation and is expected to profoundly change the future production, lifestyles, and social forms of humanity.
10. Antibody-drug conjugates
In December 2019, Enhertu, a drug co-developed by AstraZeneca (USA) and Daiichi Sankyo (Japan), was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for marketing, marking the entry of third-generation antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) into clinical application. ADCs skillfully link specific monoclonal antibodies to highly cytotoxic payloads via stable linkers, enabling the drugs to accurately recognize tumor cells expressing specific antigens. Subsequently, the drugs are internalized by the tumor cells and release the effective payloads to selectively kill the tumor cells. ADCs have expanded the therapeutic boundaries for malignant tumors, promoted the transformation of cancer treatment from indiscriminate therapy to precision targeted therapy, and opened up a new path for humanity in overcoming cancer and other diseases [
11].
The Global Top Ten Engineering Achievements 2025 comprehensively showcase cutting-edge breakthroughs and systematic innovation capabilities in global engineering and technological fields in recent years. Some are disruptive technologies leading to industrial transformation, some are major technological equipment driving the progress of civilization, and others are key infrastructure projects related to humanity’s sustainable development. These achievements not only promote the development of new quality productive forces but also highlight the crucial role of engineering and technology in addressing global challenges. Here, we would like to extend our greatest respect to all the scientists and engineers who have contributed their insight and efforts to these global achievements!
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