Nebius x NVIDIA Global AI Hackathon

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.

An honest correction to why this card exists. We added it on 31 August because the field was small — 1,206 registrations against a $50,000+ pool. That argument no longer holds: registrations have gone 1,206 to 2,743 to 3,548 to 9,065 to 13,148 to 17,811 to 21,437, and stand at 24,785 as of 19 October 2026. For comparison, Amazon's Build Ship Shape hackathon has 56,965 registrations for $138,000 in cash — more crowded, but still more cash per entrant than the $39,000 reachable here. We would rather say so than leave a stale claim on the page.

What is still genuinely in its favour is the brief. Every submission must run on Nebius Token Factory or Nebius AI Cloud and use at least one NVIDIA open-source model, which is a real constraint rather than a theme — registering is one click, finishing against that stack is not, so the number of complete submissions will be a fraction of the registration count in a way it is not for an open-ended hackathon. You also get two months and four self-selected categories, so this remains startable from zero during term. Be clear about which money you can actually reach: the $20,000 grand prize, $10,000 for second, $6,000 for third and a $3,000 Best Use of Tavily award — $39,000 in all. The four category winners receive NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano hardware rather than cash, and the twenty $500 City Winner Awards require attending an in-person Builders & Brews meetup whose published cities (Tokyo, Da Nang, Seoul, Singapore, London, Berlin, Paris, Mexico City, New York, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles) include none in India. Devpost states plainly that you do not need to attend an event to enter the hackathon.

The rest of the practical detail. You are building on paid GPU infrastructure: $25 in Token Factory credits via the event activation code and another $25 for joining the Nebius Builders Program, so size your experiments against $50 rather than assuming unlimited compute. 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.