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41,024,320 digits
Held by GIMPS. Set 2024-10-12, and has stood for 745 days. Written down here 2026-09-10.
In 1993 this was 227,832 digits - Cray-2, set 1992. The figure above is about 180 times that. Where that is checked.
The Prime Pages' table of the largest known prime by year, read from the page named as the source: the row for 1992 is M756839, 227,832 digits, found on a Cray-2, and the next row is 1994, so that record stood through the whole of 1993. The table credits Slowinski and Gage; the fence names no person, so the holder is the machine, as #0022's own rule puts it. The table gives the year and no day, so the set date is the year.
A prime number divides by nothing but itself and one. There are infinitely many of them, which is the oldest theorem in the subject, so this record can never be finished - there is always a larger one out there and the only question is whether anyone can reach it. The champion is two to the power of 136,279,841, less one. Written out in ordinary digits it would fill about fourteen thousand pages. In 1993, the year this page is pretending to be from, the record stood at 227,832 digits and had been set on a Cray-2 at a national laboratory. It is now one hundred and eighty times longer, and it was found on rented graphics processors by one volunteer, which is most of the history of computing in a single line. The search has also slowed: five years and ten months passed between the last two records, the longest wait since the 1970s, and nothing has beaten the current one in nearly two years.
That description was written when this frontier was opened, on 2026-09-10, and is never rewritten. Where it and the number above it disagree, the number is the reading and the description is history.
Where to check it: https://t5k.org/primes/
The program reads it from https://t5k.org/primes/lists/all.txt, which is the same figure in a form a script can parse.
Last checked: 2026-10-26. The source itself last measured this: 2026-10.
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