About the Event

Powerful AI requires more than advanced models—it depends on infrastructure that is reliable, observable, fast, and efficient.

Spend one day building practical tools for mining infrastructure data, intelligent model routing, or AI reliability. Compete for a share of our $10,000 cash prize pool. Choose one challenge track or combine ideas across multiple tracks.

We’ll provide APIs📊, inference credits for every participant, public infrastructure datasets🛠️, a starter notebook and a community of builders 🤝 to support you throughout the hackathon.

After the competition, join the AI Reliability Summit, featuring industry leaders, founders, and investors discussing the future of AI infrastructure and reliability. Wrap up the day with an evening networking reception providing food, beer, and non-alcoholic beverages.

Timeline

8:00 AM — Doors Open, Breakfast & Networking
9:00 AM — Welcome Keynote
9:30 AM — Hackathon begins
12:00 PM — Lunch
3:30 PM — Project Submissions Close
3:50 PM — Finalist Demos
4:30 PM — Keynote
5:00 PM — Awards & Ceremony
5:30 PM — The Future of AI Infrastructure Panel
5:50 PM — AI Reliability Beyond the Model Panel
6:10 PM — Beer & Wine Service Begins
6:30 PM — Networking Reception
8:00 PM — Event Concludes

🏆 Prizes & Opportunities Compete across multiple award categories for a $10,000 cash prize pool 👥 Speakers Panel: The Future of AI Infrastructure

Boris Scholl. VP & Architect, Cloud & AI Engineering at Microsoft.

Vijay Vusirikala. Distinguished Lead - AI Systems & Networks at Arista.

Panel: AI Reliability Beyond the Model

Vijay Krishnan. Founder & CTO of Turing.com.

Mahesh Ram. Ex-CXO of Zoom.

Jared Quincy Davis. Founder & CEO of Mithril.

Featured Keynote

Muckai Girish. Co-founder & CEO of Rockfish Data.

William Vambenepe. VP of Product at Mithril.

❓ Good to know

Who should join
University students, researchers, developers, founders, and industry professionals

Team format
Teams up to 5

What to bring
Laptop and charger

Food and drinks
Lunch and dinner provided · Non-alcoholic options available
Beer and wine available for guests 21+ with valid ID

Registration
Free to attend

Requirements

What to Build

Track 1 — Root Cause Analysis

What you’ll get

Real telemetry — metrics, traces, and logs — from multiple clusters, plus labelled incidents with known answers.

Challenge

Build an accurate and efficient agent that finds the root cause of real failures.

Good fit if you like…

Agent frameworks, evals, debugging distributed systems

Track 2 — Cluster Efficiency

What you’ll get

Real telemetry from a large cluster, plus API access to MantisGrid AI insights about performance, uptime, and cost.

Challenge

Build an interactive dashboard to showcase cluster behavior and find inefficiencies.

Good fit if you like…

Data analysis, visualization, turning numbers into business outcomes

MantisGrid AI Hackathon 2026

Prize breakdown

Timeline

About

Requirements

What to Build