The transverse momentum spectra of charged particles have been measured in pp and PbPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76~\mathrm{TeV}$ by the CMS experiment at the LHC. In the transverse momentum range p T=5–10 GeV/c, the charged particle yield in the most central PbPb collisions is suppressed by up to a factor of 7 compared to the pp yield scaled by the number of incoherent nucleon–nucleon collisions. At higher p T, this suppression is significantly reduced, approaching roughly a factor of 2 for particles with p T in the range p T=40–100 GeV/c.