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Now anyone can host a global AI challenge

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Now anyone can host a global AI challenge

Mar 19, 2026

Introducing Kaggle Community Hackathons, where organizations can create their own custom hackathons to provide AI builders with opportunities to solve complex problems and build their professional portfolios. Plus, we’re providing organizations with up to $10,000 in prizes, at no cost.

Jessica Lee

Software Engineer

Addison Howard

Program Manager

General summary

Kaggle is launching Community Hackathons, enabling anyone to create AI competitions using Kaggle’s infrastructure for free. Use these hackathons to solve complex problems, build your professional portfolio, and discover novel results. If you want to host a hackathon, you can create one in minutes; if you want to compete, monitor the Kaggle Competitions page.

Summaries were generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental.

Bullet points

This article introduces Community Hackathons, letting anyone host AI challenges using Kaggle's platform.
Community Hackathons help individuals, schools, and businesses create AI competitions for free.
Hosts get tools for data, notebooks, forums, write-ups, judging, and up to $10,000 in prizes.
Companies like the NFL, OpenAI, and Google have used Kaggle hackathons to solve problems.
You can host a hackathon now or watch the Kaggle Competitions page for new opportunities.

Summaries were generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental.

Basic explainer

Kaggle now lets anyone create AI contests called Community Hackathons. People can use these contests to solve problems or show off their AI skills. Companies like the NFL and Google already use these contests. Now, you can make your own contest and offer prizes up to $10000.

Summaries were generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental.

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Kaggle's community helps the world discover what actually works in AI, and today we're launching Community Hackathons to build on that mission. Community Hackathons is built to help communities, individuals, schools and businesses and create professional-grade AI competitions using Kaggle’s infrastructure, at no cost. These are a great way for builders to solve complex problems with AI and hone their professional portfolios.

As the AI landscape evolves, so too do the ways in which builders showcase their skills — moving beyond traditional predictive models toward building full applications, generating novel data insights and creatively utilizing large language models (LLMs). The gap between builders and the frontier has never been smaller and Community Hackathons are an amazing way to bring people together to discover novel results.

Leading companies and research organizations have already been using Hackathons to tackle unique AI problems by challenging the world to solve them:

The NFL has used Kaggle hackathons to create new statistics, hire talent and even make rule changes to improve player safety.
OpenAI used hackathons to red-team their first open-access model, and to help identify possibly hidden archeological sites.
The Google AI Studio team ran two Hackathons with the release of Gemini models. One challenged users to get creative with Nano Banana, and the other testing developers' vibe coding sprint abilities with the release of Gemini 3 Pro. These hackathons shared nearly $1M in combined prizes.
The Gemma 3n release was accompanied by a challenge to use "AI for global impact" and you’ll want to have tissues on hand when you review the results.

Now, Community Hackathons allows you to tap into the AI community to solve problems you care about.

Community Hackathon Features

Community Hackathons are built to be flexible and self-service, providing a seamless experience for both hosts and participants. By making the platform available to hosts worldwide, Kaggle enables diverse, custom-built challenges that drive skill development and portfolio enhancement. Hosts gain access to all the necessary tools for running a successful event, including:

Integrated tools for data hosting, interactive notebooks and discussion forums.
Support for writeup submissions and a project gallery to showcase results.
Flexibility for multiple competition tracks and judge management.
Prize pools permitted up to $10,000 USD.

How to get started today

Whether your goal is to challenge the global AI community to build a world-changing application or to host a private internal skill-building event for your organization, Community Hackathons are ready.

Want to host a Hackathon? Create your own in minutes.

Want to compete? Keep an eye on the Kaggle Competitions page for new Community Hackathons appearing soon.

Have questions? Connect with other competition hosts in the dedicated Competition Hosting forum.

We can’t wait to see what you build and what new skills you hone!

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