European AI Hackathon

Open Hackathons are multi-day, hands-on coding events that help developers and researchers accelerate, optimize, and scale their applications on a variety of data center architectures. Attendees work with dedicated mentors to identify and address data-loading bottlenecks, parallelize training, and optimize AI pipelines to accelerate experimentation and realize performance gains.

The European AI Hackathon, running from 6 October to 29 October 2026, targets small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), startups, industry practitioners, and researchers across Europe, with the aim of building AI-driven products and services. Teams benefit from personalized, expert guidance to take their AI workloads to the next level and access to leadership-class compute resources.

Examples of AI projects include:

Agentic Contract Intelligence: Multi-agent pipelines that parse, risk-score, and redline contracts across languages and jurisdictions

Real-Time Energy Grid Balancing: Agentic systems running thousands of parallel simulations to autonomously balance distributed energy resources within live decision windows

Legacy Code Modernization: Fine-tuning open-weight code LLMs on COBOL/Fortran codebases with long-context windows to enable enterprise migration

Autonomous Quality Inspection: Vision models running high‑FPS inference to detect defects on production lines. Predictive Maintenance at Scale: Multimodal LLMs that integrate sensor logs, manuals, and historical failures to recommend interventions

These projects are illustrations, not constraints. Any AI workload that benefits from scaling, speed-up, and hands‑on expert guidance is welcome.

Target audience

Applying teams should have a clear project ready for further development and scaling. Participating teams must be based in the EU and/or EuroHPC JU member countries. Please ensure that your team meets all prerequisites before you apply and use your company/institute email address in the application form.

Registration

To register, visit the main European AI Hackathon webpage.

Organizer

This hackathon is co-organized by Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC), the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH (Cyfronet), OpenACC organization, and NVIDIA for AI Factory Austria AI:AT, HammerHAI, and Gaia AI Factory.

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