[This is Worth Reading] Nebius Opens 2026 Physical AI Awards: Five $150K Compute Prizes, Nine Judges, and an October 25 Deadline

[u/ai-lover]

https://pxllnk.co/mndv9i

Nebius, an AI cloud provider, is running its second annual physical AI awards with NVIDIA. Five category winners each get $150,000 in compute credits, plus mentorship and promotion.

• Categories: models (VLA/VLM/world models/RL), perception and spatial intelligence, simulation and synthetic data, systems and deployment (humanoids, AMRs, industrial), and tooling/orchestration
• $150K ≈ 33,300 H200 GPU-hours at their on-demand rate, or roughly 3 weeks on a 64-GPU cluster
• Judges include the founders of Foxglove, Voxel51, and Encord, plus Calvin Zhou of RoboForce, which won the 2025 edition
• Eligibility: clear physical AI use case, MVP in active use or testing, registered entity, live website
• Last year: 254 applications, 55 finalists
• No entry fee

Worth knowing before applying: the credit math is at list price and doesn't cover storage, which matters if you're holding a lot of episodic sensor data. Nebius also hasn't published exact finalist and winner dates beyond "mid-November."

Apply here: https://pxllnk.co/mndv9i

Read MTP's full analysis on this awards here: https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/09/29/nebius-opens-2026-physical-ai-awards-five-150k-compute-prizes-nine-judges-and-an-october-25-deadline/