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With its sights set firmly on the future of technology, KIEFER and Sophea.ai, in collaboration with NVIDIA and the OpenACC organization, officially launched the KIEFER AI Open Hackathon 2026 on Monday, April 27. This landmark event brings together seven elite teams from Greece and abroad, marking a new chapter of innovation for the domestic AI ecosystem.
During the opening ceremony, KIEFER CEO Christos Petrocheilos revealed three strategic developments that set a new benchmark for the industry:
“Hugging Face”: KIEFER’s open-source debut
The company officially unveiled Hugging Face, its first open-source protocol developed in-house. This move is a concrete demonstration of KIEFER’s commitment to collaborative development and the global developer community, promoting transparency and the free exchange of technical expertise.
Sophea K1: Greece’s first open-source large language model
In a landmark moment for Greek AI, KIEFER announced the public release of Sophea K1, a 28-billion parameter Large Language Model (LLM) purpose-built for the Greek language.
Accessibility: The model is now available on Hugging Face (huggingface.co/KIEFERSA/sophea-k1) under an MIT open-source license.
Performance: It achieves an overall accuracy of 83.34% on the GreekMMLU benchmark, with standout performance in Social Sciences (85.70%), STEM (82.97%), and Humanities (82.38%).
Next-Gen Roadmap: KIEFER confirmed that its next-generation model, built in collaboration with NVIDIA and based on the Nemotron architecture, is already in development and will go live by September 2026.
A ticket to Greece’s first sovereign data center
In a major boost for the participants, it was announced that all seven hackathon teams will gain privileged access to Greece’s first sovereign AI data center. The infrastructure is slated to go live in October 2026, allowing these teams to deploy their solutions on the nation’s premier sovereign AI infrastructure from day one.
The Hackathon’s elite at work
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The seven selected teams are currently leveraging the massive compute power of NVIDIA B200 Tensor Core GPUs to develop state-of-the-art applications under real-world conditions:
The Mandalorians
Miru
Big O No
Tenkai
MEDΩ
TentaFlow
Magenta Pistols
Working alongside them are expert engineers from NVIDIA and KIEFER AI, providing high-level mentorship to transform innovative ideas into market-ready proof-of-concept applications.
About the event
The KIEFER AI Open Hackathon runs from April 27 to 30, 2026. Hosted in Athens with hybrid participation options, the event focuses on the full-stack optimization of critical data center infrastructure, bridging the gap between CPU and GPU power to drive next-generation AI solutions.