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Nebius and NVIDIA · HackathonNebius x NVIDIA Global AI Hackathon
Two months to build an AI project on Nebius infrastructure using an NVIDIA open-source model, for a $50,000+ pool topped by a $20,000 cash grand prize. The reason to look now is contention: 1,206 people had registered at the time of writing, against 8,872 on a comparable Google Cloud hackathon and 21,856 on the RevenueCat Shipaton. Submissions close 30 October 2026.
Dates & timeline
Prizes
- Grand Prize: $20,000 cash
- 2nd place: $10,000 cash; 3rd place: $6,000 cash
- Best Use of Tavily: $3,000 cash
- Four category winners: an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano each — hardware, not cash
- 20 City Winner Awards of $500 each, but only for attendees of an in-person Builders & Brews meetup
- 10 Most Valuable Feedback awards of $100 plus NVIDIA swag
- 1,206 registered participants at the time of writing — a small field for a $50,000+ pool
- Four categories: Coding and Agentic Engineering, Best Apps and Agents, Personal AI, Physical AI
- $25 in Token Factory credits via the event code, plus $25 more through the Nebius Builders Program
- Submission is a working demo, a 3-minute video and a public open-source repository
Why it's worth your time
This is a two-month online hackathon run by Nebius with NVIDIA, managed by Devpost. The build constraint is specific and worth reading before you commit: every submission must run on either Nebius Token Factory or Nebius AI Cloud and must use at least one NVIDIA open-source model. Beyond that you pick one of four categories — Coding and Agentic Engineering, Best Apps and Agents, Personal AI, or Physical AI — and submit a working demo, a three-minute video, a public repository under an open-source licence and a project description.
The argument for entering this one rather than a bigger-name hackathon is the size of the field. At the time of writing 1,206 people had registered, on a $50,000+ pool. For comparison, Google Cloud's Agentic Cinema had 8,872 registrations for a $75,000 pool and the RevenueCat Shipaton had 21,856. Fewer entrants for comparable money is the most underrated variable in choosing which hackathon to spend a month on, and a two-month window from the end of August means this is genuinely startable from zero alongside a semester.
Two things to be honest about. First, the money is not evenly reachable. The cash you can win from a laptop in India is the $20,000 grand prize, $10,000 for second, $6,000 for third and a $3,000 Best Use of Tavily award; the four category winners receive NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano hardware rather than cash. The twenty $500 City Winner Awards require having attended one of the in-person Builders & Brews meetups, and the published city list — Tokyo, Da Nang, Seoul, Singapore, London, Berlin, Paris, Mexico City, New York, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles — contains no Indian city, so treat that portion of the pool as out of reach. Devpost states plainly that you do not need to attend an event to enter the hackathon. Second, you are building on paid GPU infrastructure: $50 of credits is a real head start but it is not unlimited, so size your experiments before you burn through it.
The official rules exclude residents of Brazil, Quebec, Russia, Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and any other country comprehensively sanctioned by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. India is not on that list. You must be at least the age of majority where you live, and teams are allowed.
How to apply
Register on the official Devpost page and read the rules for your country — the excluded list is short and India is not on it.
Claim your credits before you write any code: the promo form takes activation code NEBIUS-DEVPOST-GLOBAL26 for $25, and joining the Nebius Builders Program adds another $25 plus Tavily and Nebius Academy credits.
Pick one of the four categories early and build for its criteria rather than trying to be impressive in general.
Run your project on Nebius Token Factory or Nebius AI Cloud with at least one NVIDIA open-source model — a submission that does not is out of scope regardless of quality.
Record the three-minute demo video, publish the repository under an open-source licence, and submit before 30 October 2026, 10:00am PT.
Frequently asked questions
Can students in India enter?
Yes. The official rules exclude residents of Brazil, Quebec, Russia, Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and other countries comprehensively sanctioned by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, and India is not among them. You must be at least the age of majority where you live, and the hackathon is fully online.
How much of the prize money can I actually win from India?
The prizes open to a remote entrant are the $20,000 grand prize, $10,000 for second, $6,000 for third and a $3,000 Best Use of Tavily award, all in cash. The four category winners receive NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano hardware instead of cash. The twenty $500 City Winner Awards require attending an in-person Builders & Brews meetup, and no Indian city is on the published list of thirteen — so that part of the pool is not realistically available to you.
Does it cost anything to enter or to build?
Entry is free — the rules state “NO PURCHASE OR PAYMENT NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN.” Building runs on paid GPU infrastructure, but the event's resources page offers $25 in Nebius Token Factory credits through a promo form using activation code NEBIUS-DEVPOST-GLOBAL26, and a further $25 plus Tavily and Nebius Academy credits for joining the Nebius Builders Program. Budget your experiments against that $50 rather than assuming unlimited compute.
What exactly do I have to build?
A project that runs on either Nebius Token Factory or Nebius AI Cloud and uses at least one NVIDIA open-source model, entered in one of four categories: Coding and Agentic Engineering, Best Apps and Agents, Personal AI, or Physical AI. You submit a working demo, a three-minute video, a public code repository under an open-source licence and a project description.
Why enter this rather than a better-known hackathon?
The field. At the time of writing 1,206 people had registered for this $50,000+ pool, against 8,872 on Google Cloud's $75,000 Agentic Cinema and 21,856 on the RevenueCat Shipaton. You are also given two months rather than a weekend, which is enough time to learn the stack from scratch during term.
When is the deadline?
Submissions close on Friday, 30 October 2026 at 10:00am Pacific Time. The submission period opened on 26 August 2026.
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