Once a physical AI product is in the field, the compute problem changes shape. Fleet data starts arriving faster than a team can label it, every retraining cycle has to be validated before it ships to hardware, and the sim-to-real loop stops being a research exercise and becomes a release process. That is the stage the 2026 Nebius Physical AI Awards is built for: startups with a demonstrable product, meaningful traction, and a plan to scale.
Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) runs the program with NVIDIA. Applications are open now and close October 25, 2026. Finalists and winners are announced in mid-November 2026. The competition is global, with five categories and a $150,000 compute credit prize in each.
What winners receive
The winner in each of the five categories gets:
- $150,000 in Nebius compute credits, positioned by Nebius as credits to put directly into the next training run.
- Joint promotion from Nebius and NVIDIA across both companies’ channels.
- Executive mentorship: working sessions with a Nebius C-level leader on scaling what the team has built.
- A Winners Circle feature: content on the team and the product, published by Nebius.
- Two seats at an exclusive executive dinner next year with leaders from the Physical AI ecosystem.
There is no entry fee and no sponsored categories.
What $150,000 in credits converts to
Nebius publishes its GPU-hour rates, so the prize converts to concrete compute rather than an abstract number. At on-demand rates, $150,000 buys roughly:
| GPU (HGX node) | On-demand $/GPU-hr | GPU-hours from $150K | 8-GPU node-days |
|---|---|---|---|
| H100 | $3.85 | ~38,960 | ~203 |
| H200 | $4.50 | ~33,330 | ~174 |
| B200 | $7.15 | ~20,980 | ~109 |
| B300 | $7.85 | ~19,100 | ~99 |
For a team already running multi-node training, $150K on H200s is about 521 hours on a 64-GPU cluster, roughly three weeks of continuous work. At preemptible H200 rates ($2.45/GPU-hour) it stretches to about 61,200 GPU-hours, which suits checkpointable RL and data-generation jobs. vCPU and RAM are bundled into the GPU rate, so the main figure is not diluted by separate instance charges.
Five categories, one strongest product
Nebius asks applicants to enter the category that best fits their product. Companies with several products may apply to additional categories, but the guidance is to lead with the strongest product in the single most relevant category rather than spread entries across several.
- Physical AI Models: VLAs, VLMs, world models, reinforcement learning.
- Perception & Spatial Intelligence: computer vision, SLAM, sensor fusion, scene understanding.
- Simulation & Synthetic Data: physics simulation, digital twins, sim-to-real transfer, synthetic data.
- Systems & Deployment: humanoids, industrial robots, AMRs, warehouse automation.
- Software, Tooling & Orchestration: middleware, MLOps, benchmarking, fleet management, deployment tooling.
The stated eligibility criteria are a clear Physical AI use case, an MVP in active use or testing, a registered legal entity, and a live public website. Each application covers one product.
Who is judging
Applications are first screened in-house for quality and completeness. A panel selected by Nebius and NVIDIA then scores each entry on four criteria: depth of innovation, breadth of implementation, market potential, and real-world impact. Finalists go to a jury vote to decide category winners.
The 2026 judging committee as listed on the awards page:
- Evan Helda, Head of Physical AI, Nebius
- Anu Maheshwari, Head of Venture Ecosystem, Nebius
- Sumay Parikh, Robotics & Physical AI Startup Lead, NVIDIA
- Amber Yang, Partner, Lightspeed
- Adrian Macneil, CEO, Foxglove
- Brian Moore, Co-founder and CEO, Voxel51
- Ulrik Stig Hansen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Encord
- Harry Mellsop, Co-founder, Antioch
- Calvin Zhou, Co-founder and VP of Engineering, RoboForce
Nebius expects to add more judges before the deadline. The panel is weighted toward operators: Macneil, Moore, and Hansen run companies that sell data and tooling infrastructure to physical AI teams (Foxglove, Voxel51, and Encord), and Zhou co-founded RoboForce, which won the Industrial Robotics category in 2025. Applicants will be scored by people who have built the same data pipelines they are describing, and by one team that came through this program a year ago.
The 2025 cohort
The program’s first edition, run in 2025 as the Nebius Robotics & Physical AI Awards, drew 254 applications, from which judges picked 55 finalists who shared $1.5 million in Nebius compute credits. The judging panel that year included executives and investors from Nebius, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Physical Intelligence, ABB, Khosla Ventures, Accel, Radical Ventures, Next47, and Shanda Grab Ventures.
Several winners have since scaled. RoboForce, the Industrial Robotics winner, raised a $52 million round led by YZi Labs in March 2026 and reports more than 11,000 robot orders via letters of intent. Gather AI, the Vision AI and Analytics winner, closed a $40 million Series B led by Smith Point Capital in February 2026. Virgo, runner-up in Foundation Models, went on to win at the 2026 Nebius AI Discovery Awards. (Note: Nebius does not attribute these outcomes to the award, but they describe the kind of company the program recognizes.)
Key Takeaways
- Applications close October 25, 2026; finalists and winners announced in mid-November 2026.
- Five $150,000 prizes in Nebius compute credits, one per category.
- Judged by a nine-person panel selected by Nebius and NVIDIA, with joint promotion from both for winners.
- Winners get two seats at an exclusive executive dinner next year.
Check out the 2026 Physical AI Awards page and application, the Nebius AI Cloud pricing page, the 2025 program results, and the 2025 winners press release.
Note:Thanks to the Nebius AI team for the thought leadership/ Resources for this article. Nebius team has supported and sponsored this content/article for promotion.
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