European AI Hackathon 2026 — Cyprus (Pharos-CY)

A four-week, mentor-led AI hackathon run by Europe's EuroHPC AI Factories with NVIDIA — and Cyprus' own AI Factory Antenna, Pharos-CY, is one of the factories it is organised for. Participation from Cyprus is remote: the only on-site venue is Stuttgart. Dates and shape. The event runs 6 October to 29 October 2026, but it is not 24 days of hacking. It is four structured session days with three weeks of self-organised team work in between:

• Day 0 — 6 October (virtual): cluster dry run. You get your code running on the machine before anything else starts.
• Day 1 — 13 October (virtual): team introductions, breakout rooms with assigned mentors, first progress presentations.
• 14–26 October: teams and mentors keep working between sessions. No scheduled programme.
• Days 2–4 — 27, 28 and 29 October (hybrid): the build phase proper, online or on-site at HLRS, Nobelstraße 19, 70569 Stuttgart. Finishes 29 October, 17:00.

Organisers. Co-organised by Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC), the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH, the OpenACC organization and NVIDIA, for the AI Factories AI:AT (Austria), HammerHAI, Gaia AI Factory and the AI Factory Antenna Cyprus Pharos-CY. Who it is for. SMEs, start-ups, industry practitioners and researchers building AI-driven products and services. Mentoring is by NVIDIA engineers plus additional expert mentors. Free of charge. Hard entry requirements — read these before applying:

• Minimum three team members, all committed to full participation across every session day.
• All members must be based in the EU or a EuroHPC JU member country (Cyprus qualifies).
• You bring your own project. Teams must be "fluent with the code or project" they arrive with — this is an acceleration and optimisation event, not an idea competition.
• Projects must carry an attached licence; permissive open-source is preferred.

Topics on the published agenda: agentic AI applications including contract intelligence, energy grid balancing, code modernisation, quality inspection and predictive maintenance. The catch, stated plainly. The application deadline was 31 August 2026; organisers say late applications are accepted subject to capacity, so if you are reading this on 1 October you have five days to Day 0 and you are asking for a favour, not registering. Note also that the organisers' own HLRS and HPC-portal listings name only AI:AT, HammerHAI and Gaia — Pharos-CY appears in the openhackathons.org description and as a logo on the official ASC event page, but no Cyprus on-site venue and no Cyprus-specific track has been published. Treat the Cyprus link as institutional (the Cyprus Institute's CaSToRC coordinates Pharos-CY) rather than as a local event you can walk into. Why it still belongs on this list. This is the second time in 2026 that Pharos-CY has appeared among the AI Factories behind a NVIDIA-mentored European training event — the European Agentic AI Bootcamp (20–22 July 2026) drew over 250 participants with Pharos-CY named the same way. Pharos-CY's own mandate commits it to running "tailored programs, workshops, and hackathons" as a national AI training hub, with access to the DAEDALUS EuroHPC supercomputer. For a Cypriot SME, the practical read is this: the route to NVIDIA engineers and EuroHPC compute now runs through a Nicosia-coordinated project, and it is free — but you have to already have a codebase worth accelerating. Watch for the next cycle rather than scrambling at this one.

Event website