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Announcing Amazon Nova AI Hackathon: Turn Your Ideas into Reality

Announcing Amazon Nova AI Hackathon: Turn Your Ideas into Reality

Join developers worldwide to build innovative generative AI solutions using frontier foundation models and compete for $40,000 in prizes across five categories including agentic AI, multimodal understanding, UI automation, and voice experiences during this six-week challenge from February 2nd to March 16th, 2026.

Jauhari, Anuj

The next breakthrough in AI could come from you. Whether you're automating complex workflows, creating intelligent voice assistants, or building applications that understand the world through multiple modalities, Amazon Nova gives you the tools to turn your innovative ideas into reality.
We're inviting developers worldwide to participate in the Amazon Nova AI Hackathon , co-sponsored by IBM, a six-week challenge to explore what's possible when you combine frontier foundation models and services with your creativity. This is your opportunity to innovate with the latest AI capabilities, tackle challenging problems, showcase your skills, and compete for $40,000 in cash prizes.

What is Amazon Nova?

Amazon Nova  are a family of frontier foundation models (FMs) and services for reasoning, multimodal intelligence, and agentic AI. Below are the models and services that are generally available currently:
⭐ Nova 2 Lite, a fast, cost-effective reasoning model for everyday tasks.
🎤 Nova 2 Sonic, a speech-to-speech model for conversational AI.🤖 Nova Act - build and manage fleets of agents for automating production UI workflows with high reliability
🤖 Nova Act to build and manage fleets of agents for automating production UI workflows with high reliability
🔍 Amazon Nova Multimodal Embeddings, a state-of-the-art embedding model for agentic RAG and semantic search

Choose what you build and compete

Build a generative AI application using Amazon Nova on AWS. You may use any preferred services, frameworks (such as Strands Agents ), and tools (such as MCP), but your solution must use a Nova foundation model (such as Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Sonic, Nova Multimodal Embedding) and/or the Nova Act service. Choose from five categories:
  • Agentic AI: Build solutions where agents use Nova's reasoning capabilities to tackle complex, real-world problems
  • Multimodal Understanding: Create applications that understand and/or generate across text, documents, speech, images, or video using Nova
  • UI Automation: Build Nova Act-powered agents that automate real-world workflows across web applications
  • Voice AI: Create real-time conversational voice experiences using Nova 2 Sonic
  • Freestyle: Submit projects that don't fit into the above categories

Prizes

We're offering $40,000 in cash prizes and $200,000 in AWS credits:Overall Prizes:
  • First Place: $15,000 + $5,000 in AWS Credits
  • Second Place: $7,000 + $5,000 in AWS Credits
Category Winners:
  • Best of Agentic System: $3,000 + $5,000 in AWS Credits
  • Best of Multimodal Understanding: $3,000 + $5,000 in AWS Credits
  • Best of UI Automation: $3,000 + $5,000 in AWS Credits
  • Best of Voice AI: $3,000 + $5,000 in AWS Credits
  • Best Student App: $3,000 + $5,000 in AWS Credits
Additional Prizes:
  • AWS Builder Center Blog Prize: $200 AWS Credits × 100 winners
  • Feedback Survey Prize: $50 × 60 winners
Participating teams can also request $100 in AWS Credits (available on a first-come, first-served basis).

Judging Criteria

Projects will be evaluated based on the below criteria. The submissions will be evaluated by a panel of business and technical leaders from AWS, Amazon AGI, and hackathon co-sponsor partners.
  • Technical Implementation (60%): Quality, effectiveness, successful integration with Amazon Nova, and overall system architecture
  • Enterprise or Community Impact (20%): Business value or meaningful benefits for communities
  • Creativity and Innovation (20%): Novel approaches to solving real-world problems

Timeline

  • Event Launch: February 2, 2026
  • Submission Period: February 2 – March 16, 2026 (6 weeks)
  • Judging: March 17 – April 2, 2026
  • Winners Announced: April 8, 2026

Getting Started

Register and submit your project at amazon-nova@devpost.com 

Resources to Help You Build

Community Blog Prize

Inspire others by writing about your project on Amazon Builder Center. Describe how your project can positively affect your target community. Discuss the potential benefits, envisioned real-world application, and any plans for encouraging adoption hundred winners will receive $200 AWS Credits each.

Ready to build?

Register now at amazon-nova.devpost.com  and join developers worldwide in exploring the future of generative AI with Amazon Nova. We can't wait to see what you create.
Any opinions in this article are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.
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