NVIDIA Applied Research Accelerator Program for AI and GPU Computing

NVIDIA's Academic Hardware Grant Program donates GPU hardware to qualifying academic researchers, with a specific track focused on AI Safety and Trustworthy AI research (including interpretability, alignment, evaluation, red-teaming, and bias/fairness). Awardees receive workstation- or datacenter-class NVIDIA GPUs delivered to their institutions for use in research projects. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis through the NVIDIA Higher Education and Research portal. Projects must produce a publishable research output or open-source artifact and acknowledge NVIDIA's hardware contribution. The AI Safety track is specifically highlighted by NVIDIA's collaboration with the AI Safety Directory and prioritizes researchers working on interpretability, evaluations, robustness, and trustworthy ML. Strong fit for graduate students, postdocs, and early-career faculty doing AI safety, alignment, or interpretability research at universities without existing GPU access, as well as nonprofit AI safety research organizations.

Amazon Research Awards gives unrestricted gifts to academic researchers working on topics Amazon cares about. The Fall 2026 call covers nine topics: Agentic AI; AI for Information Security; Amazon Security (using AI on hard security problems); Automated Reasoning for systems assurance by mathematical proof; AWS Cryptography; Build on Trainium (agentic recursive improvement of kernels and frameworks); Multilingual and Contextual AI Evaluation; On-Device Multimodal Perception; and Synthetic Data Generation for Multimodal Perception. Awards go to the PI's academic institution or organization. Recipients are encouraged to publish their results and open-source related code, and each is assigned an Amazon research contact. Amazon extended the Fall 2026 submission deadline to November 11, 2026. Each topic has its own CFP page with amounts and eligibility details.

Google's Gemma 4 Developer Agent Competition on Kaggle, launched 23 September 2026, challenges entrants to post-train Gemma 4 open models into autonomous coding agents. The agents must run offline on consumer hardware, navigate large codebases and draft fixes for real software issues. Fine-tuning, including LoRA, and reinforcement learning are encouraged, and one submission is allowed per day. The $110,000 prize pool covers a main leaderboard track paying $37,000, $18,000 and $10,000 for the top three. A separate paper track carries $35,000 with its own 12 November 2026 deadline. A $10,000 bonus goes to the best agent built on the smaller Gemma E2B or E4B models. Winning solutions are released under Apache 2.0, and top entries may be featured at a Google-hosted event such as a NeurIPS expo workshop. The entry deadline is 25 November 2026, and final submissions are due 2 December 2026 at 11:59 PM UTC.

The Enveda CASMI 2026 competition on Kaggle is the 2026 Critical Assessment of Small Molecule Identification challenge. It launched on 14 September 2026 and is sponsored by Enveda Therapeutics. Entrants build machine-learning models that predict 2D chemical structures, as SMILES strings, from LC-MS/MS tandem mass spectra of natural products in complex biological extracts. Models must handle both known and novel molecules, going beyond spectral library matching. The stated applications are drug discovery and finding disease biomarkers. The $50,000 prize pool pays $16,000, $12,000, $9,000, $7,000 and $6,000 to the top five teams. Winning solutions are released under the MIT licence, and the data is limited to competition and non-commercial academic use under CC BY-NC 4.0. The entry deadline is 7 December 2026, and final submissions are due 14 December 2026 at 11:59 PM UTC.