These days, a sizable number of meta-heuristic algorithms are utilized to address many problems with numerous variables and huge complexity. One of the most popular swarm intelligence-based meta-heuristic methods is the chimp optimization algorithm inspired by chimps’ individual intelligence and sexual motivation in their group hunting. This paper proposes a weighted chimp optimization algorithm to tackle two main issues in large-scale numerical optimization problems, such as low convergence speed and local optima trapping to solve high-dimensional problems. The main difference between the weighted and standard chimp optimization algorithms is that a position-weighted equation is offered to enhance convergence speed and avoid local optima. Moreover, the balance between exploration and exploitation is carried out in the proposed method that is crucial in the swarm intelligence-based algorithms. The presented weighted chimp optimization algorithm method is evaluated in different conditions to prove that it is the best. For this purpose, a classical set of 30 unimodal, multimodal, and fixed-dimension multimodal benchmark functions is applied to investigate the pros and cons of characteristics of the weighted chimp optimization algorithm. Besides, the proposed algorithm is tested on the IEEE congress of evolutionary computation benchmark test functions. In order to shed more light on probing the performance of the weighted chimp optimization algorithm in large-scale numerical optimization and real-world problems, it is examined by 13 high-dimensional and ten real-world optimization problems. The results show that the suggested algorithm outperforms in terms of convergence speed, the probability of getting stuck in local minimums, exploration, and exploitation compared to state-of-the-art methods in the literature. Source codes are publicly available at https://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/99344-a-weighted-chimp-optimization-algorithm.