About the challenge
The AWS Trainium Frontier competition invites ML researchers, systems engineers, and AI-agent builders to co-design models and custom kernels on purpose-built Trainium2 silicon. Teams of one to four receive a complete training pipeline, NKI documentation, and profiling tools, then race to maximize model capability within a fixed 30-minute, single-chip training budget in Phase 1. Top 10 advance to full Trn2 servers in Phase 2, competing for a $40,000 prize pool and the opportunity to present findings alongside Annapurna Labs researchers at NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney.