{"rid":"compute/aws-trainium-frontier","card":{"rid":"compute/aws-trainium-frontier","eid":"amazon-2","topic":"compute","slug":"aws-trainium-frontier","provider":"AWS Trainium Frontier","url":"https://www.amazon.science/news/aws-trainium-frontier-competition-co-design-models-and-kernels-on-purpose-built-ai-chips","domain":"amazon.science","category":"cloud VM","tier":null,"verdict":"trial-only","vorder":2,"grp":"trial","confidence":"documented","binding":"write-gated","identity_kind":"email","identity_basis":"stated","needs_card":0,"needs_phone":0,"needs_id":0,"needs_institution":0,"country":null,"crypto":null,"interfaces":"rest","egress_metered":null,"per_object_bytes":null,"retention_days":null,"verified_at":"2026-10-22T00:00:00.000Z","verified_basis":"live","checked_on":"2026-10-22","stale_on":"2026-11-21","n_evidence":1,"usd_month":null,"usd_per_tb_month":null,"summary":"The organiser supplies the silicon, quoted: 'Phase 1 gives every team a single Trainium2 chip and a 30-minute training budget, fast enough to test dozens of ...","duplicate_of":null,"n_unknown":9},"record":{"topic":"compute","slug":"aws-trainium-frontier","provider":"AWS Trainium Frontier","url":"https://www.amazon.science/news/aws-trainium-frontier-competition-co-design-models-and-kernels-on-purpose-built-ai-chips","category":"cloud VM","free_tier":{"stated":"The organiser supplies the silicon, quoted: 'Phase 1 gives every team a single Trainium2 chip and a 30-minute training budget, fast enough to test dozens of hypotheses in a single day.' Promotion buys more, quoted: 'Phase 2 promotes the top 10 teams to a full Trainium2 server with a four-hour budget, opening the door to distributed parallelism'. Prizes, quoted: 'prize money ($25,000 first place, $10,000 second, $5,000 third)'. Entry, quoted: 'Teams of one to four members are welcome'; 'The competition is open to the first 100 teams to register. Participants must be 18 or older'; 'Register by Sept 30, 2026'. Extra credits for some, quoted: 'Eligible academic teams can obtain AWS Promotional Credits covering Trainium compute and Amazon Bedrock access'.","unit":"seconds","metered_on":"wall-clock","source_url":"https://www.amazon.science/news/aws-trainium-frontier-competition-co-design-models-and-kernels-on-purpose-built-ai-chips","read_on":"2026-10-22","notes":"allowance"},"per_object_cap":{"stated":"not applicable","bytes":null,"source_url":"https://www.amazon.science/news/aws-trainium-frontier-competition-co-design-models-and-kernels-on-purpose-built-ai-chips","notes":null},"retention":{"stated":"not applicable","days":null,"source_url":"https://www.amazon.science/news/aws-trainium-frontier-competition-co-design-models-and-kernels-on-purpose-built-ai-chips","notes":null},"egress":{"terms":"not stated","metered":false,"free_allowance":null,"price_per_tb":null,"source_url":"https://www.amazon.science/news/aws-trainium-frontier-competition-co-design-models-and-kernels-on-purpose-built-ai-chips"},"interface":["rest"],"interface_detail":"inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed","tooling":"not stated","chaining":"The unit is chip-minutes, not dollars: 30 minutes on one Trainium2 across up to 100 teams is the cheapest route in this corpus to touching non-NVIDIA silicon, and four hours on a full server for the top ten is the only free route found to a distributed training run on Trainium. It composes with the free Kaggle quota the same way AIMO does: practice in a notebook, then spend the contest budget on architecture rather than setup.","limits":[{"kind":"write-gated","value":"the compute is a wall-clock budget on shared silicon rather than a balance: 30 minutes per Phase 1 run, four hours on a full server for the top ten, and the 2026 cycle closed registration on September 30, 2026 with the first 100 teams admitted.","source":"https://www.amazon.science/news/aws-trainium-frontier-competition-co-design-models-and-kernels-on-purpose-built-ai-chips"}],"limits_note":"the compute is a wall-clock budget on shared silicon rather than a balance: 30 minutes per Phase 1 run, four hours on a full server for the top ten, and the 2026 cycle closed registration on September 30, 2026 with the first 100 teams admitted.","binding":"write-gated","binding_note":"the compute is a wall-clock budget on shared silicon rather than a balance: 30 minutes per Phase 1 run, four hours on a full server for the top ten, and the 2026 cycle closed registration on September 30, 2026 with the first 100 teams admitted.","identity_cost":{"kind":"email","detail":null,"country":null},"reliability_note":"no reliability event recorded","confidence":"documented","evidence":[{"url":"https://www.amazon.science/news/aws-trainium-frontier-competition-co-design-models-and-kernels-on-purpose-built-ai-chips","date":"2026-10-22","proved":"'Phase 1 gives every team a single Trainium2 chip and a 30-minute training budget'; 'Phase 2 promotes the top 10 teams to a full Trainium2 server with a four-hour budget'; '$25,000 first place, $10,000 second, $5,000 third'; 'Teams of one to four members are welcome'; 'The competition is open to the first 100 teams to register. Participants must be 18 or older'; 'Register by Sept 30, 2026'; 'Eligible academic teams can obtain AWS Promotional Credits covering Trainium compute'; page 200"}],"verdict":"trial-only","verified_at":"2026-10-22T00:00:00.000Z","notes":"Recorded as trial-only because the 2026 cycle closed: registration shut on September 30, 2026 and the finalist event is at NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney. The property that matters here is that the organiser, not the entrant, pays for the accelerator, which makes it the mirror image of MLPerf, where the entrant brings the hardware. Three explanations for why AWS runs it were considered: developer adoption of Neuron, benchmark supply for Annapurna Labs, and recruiting. The prize is small enough that adoption and recruiting fit better than a research grant, but the page supports none of the three explicitly. Unverified: the country exclusion list and whether a solo entrant can register without an AWS account, because the rules page at trainium-frontier.devpost.com/rules was not opened.","extras":{"wave2":{"class":"competition-grant","free_tier_kind":"allowance","shape":{"vcpu":null,"ram_gib":null,"gpu_class":"Trainium2","gpu_count":1}}}},"claims":[{"path":"$.free_tier.stated","kind":"free-quota","num":null,"unit":null,"per":null,"currency":null,"usd":null,"fx_date":null,"parse":"unparsed"},{"path":"$.limits[0].value","kind":"limit:write-gated","num":30,"unit":"minutes","per":null,"currency":null,"usd":null,"fx_date":null,"parse":"ok"}],"unknown":[["$.egress.metered","egress-unknown"],["$.egress.terms","not-stated"],["$.identity_cost.detail","process"],["$.per_object_cap.notes","process"],["$.per_object_cap.stated","not-applicable"],["$.reliability_note","none-observed"],["$.retention.notes","process"],["$.retention.stated","not-applicable"],["$.tooling","not-stated"]],"history":[],"drift":[]}