AMD drops $10K prize for the best SO-101 robot hack in Tokyo and Paris

AMD is putting real money — and real silicon — behind the next wave of physical AI. The chipmaker, alongside Hugging Face and Data Monsters, just opened registration for the AMD Open Robotics Hackathon, a two-city event that drops a $10,000 first-place prize on the table and hands contestants the hardware to claim it.

This isn’t a slide-deck pitch competition. Teams of up to four will get their hands on SO-101 robotics kits, laptops packing AMD Ryzen AI processors, and cloud access to the brute force of Instinct MI300X GPUs. The mission is refreshingly straightforward: spend the first day in an instructor-led session getting cozy with the LeRobot development environment on AMD’s stack, then use the remaining two days to build something that actually works. Judges will score projects on a 100-point scale, weighing creativity, difficulty, ease-of-use, and practicality.

The event hits Tokyo first, from December 5-7, then moves to Paris the following weekend, December 12-14. The recommended skillset tells you exactly who AMD is courting — strong Linux chops, Python fluency, PyTorch experience, and ideally some familiarity with ROCm and embedded development. If your team can train a model and make a robot do something useful with it, you’re the target demographic. The top seven teams in each city walk away with prizes.

For AMD, the calculus is obvious. Getting hundreds of engineers and hobbyists building on ROCm and Ryzen AI in a high-pressure setting is a stress test no internal QA lab can replicate. For participants, it’s a rare shot at building on MI300X accelerators without a corporate credit card. Registration is open now and runs until just before each event starts. If the idea of turning a weekend into a working demo on someone else’s hardware sounds appealing, this is about as direct a path as you’ll find.