Armenia Showed Up: Eleveight AI Sponsors 5th Global AI Hackathon

The weekend of April 25 started the way most hackathons do: with particular tension that comes from knowing the clock starts in minutes and won't stop for twenty-four hours. This one wasn't running in one city. Hack-Nation's 5th Global AI Hackathon ran simultaneously across thirteen hubs on four continents, and one of those hubs was in Yerevan, Armenia.

What Is the Hack-Nation Global AI Hackathon?

Hack-Nation is a global AI hackathon, grounded in the MIT ecosystem and organized in partnership with the MIT Sloan AI Club. Every iteration takes the form of a 24-hour build sprint: no lectures, no workshops, but a competition during which developers design, build, and demonstrate functional AI applications in startup-like conditions.

The 2026 iteration was Hack-Nation's largest event yet: over 5,500 applications from 65+ countries, 2,000 of which were selected to compete across hubs in MIT, Stanford, ETH Zürich, London, Paris, Delhi, and Yerevan, Armenia. Challenge tracks included sponsorships by OpenAI, Google, Databricks, SAP, Mozilla, ElevenLabs, World Bank Group, and DSV-Gruppe. A panel of judges represented organizations such as Meta, NVIDIA, AWS, Adobe, Microsoft, and University of Oxford. Prize pools amounted to over $30,000, including a venture track giving selected teams access to mentorship and investors.

This was not your standard local event with a global title. This was Hack-Nation 2026, the real, worldwide hackathon.

Armenia Showed Up

TUMO Labs in Yerevan served as the official hub for Armenia's participation in the global hackathon. In total, over 100 Armenian students participated in the competition and competed on an equal footing with their counterparts across the globe.

One of these students: Daniel Hakobyan, aged 17, from Vanadzor.

Daniel participated alone. During the 24-hour competition cycle he built a fully working AI platform that generates hyper-personalized local commercial offers in real time, and his submission took first place in the DSV-Gruppe challenge, all while competing against teams from across Europe and beyond.

Why We Were There

As Armenia's next-generation AI Factories, Eleveight AI operates using NVIDIA Blackwell B300 GPUs, the same technology powering advanced AI labs around the world, and is the first facility in the Caucasus region with this generation of hardware, online and available for commercial workloads.

We provide the infrastructure, but that's only part of the story.

The other part is someone like Daniel Hakobyan using that infrastructure to compete with students from MIT and Stanford. It is young Armenian talent competing on the international scene with equal tools, equal conditions, and the same 24 hours to win. The question we keep asking ourselves is: can Armenian builders compete with teams backed by the world's most prestigious institutions, and beat them, given the same conditions?

In 2026, the answer was clear. It is not enough to have computing capacity in Armenia. What matters is when it allows Armenian builders to win competitions without leaving their country. Hack-Nation events make that possible. Daniel Hakobyan's success serves as a real world example and makes it undeniable.

What Happens Next

As mentioned earlier, Hack-Nation venture track gives participating teams access to mentorship and investors beyond the 24-hour period, allowing them to transform what they built into fully-fledged products.

Some of the next decade's most important startups will originate right there. Some of them will be from Armenia.

A huge congratulations to Daniel Hakobyan and every participant of the Armenian hub. Thank you to TUMO Labs, Hack-Nation, and every other sponsor making sure that Yerevan plays its role in defining the future of AI and technological advancement.

We will keep supporting, keep building, keep showing up.

Eleveight AI is Armenia's first NVIDIA B300 powered data center, located in Gagarin, Gegharkunik province, providing sovereign, high-performance AI compute infrastructure for enterprises, research institutions, and innovators globally.