Nebius at GTC Berlin: “no tagline needed”

We’d just watched the keynote at Nebius House and headed over to GTC Berlin. Once we made it inside along with a crowd of eager attendees, it was packed and buzzing. The first thing I noticed was robots. A lot of robots. And a clean, shiny booth, which would soon bear a new Nebius tagline, courtesy of Jensen Huang. (Scroll down for that one.)

That was Wednesday. But for me, the week in Berlin had started the previous Friday.

Nebius Build Week: Friday workshopsNebius Build Week: Friday workshops

We kicked off Nebius Build Week on October 16 with a day of workshops at the Volkswagen Group DRIVE Forum. We had two floors, with space for sessions, coworking, and conversations with our engineers.

The workshops covered inference, post-training, and physical AI. Builders could follow the sessions, work on their own projects, get help with technical questions, and take certification exams onsite. It also gave people a way to get involved in the week, even if they weren’t attending GTC itself. People came to hang out, get hands-on with the tools, and chat with our technical team.

The place was busy. At one point, we ran out of chairs.

Friday’s workshops at the DRIVE Forum, with opportunities to get certified onsite.

That evening, we went up to the Reichstag rooftop for Builders After Hours, featuring a panel, music, food, and time with the community, all with a stunning view of Berlin.

Builders After Hours, following a full day of workshops.

Sunday hackathon at CODE UniversitySunday hackathon at CODE University

Personally, my main focus pre-GTC was the NVIDIA x Nebius hackathon on Sunday, hosted at CODE University with Tech Europe. We had 1,010 registrations and more than 250 people checked in on the day. It became our biggest hackathon of the year (so far) in EMEA.

The hackathon brought more than 250 builders to CODE University.

The challenges covered quite a range of skills and use cases: agents, deep research, media generation, supplier risk, software bugs, healthcare research, and robotics. Our mentors and partners helped teams throughout the day so builders had a demo they could show by the evening.

One of the winning teams built a news show for children. It took current news, turned it into stories and questions children could follow, and presented everything through an animated owl on a television inside an explorable 1990s bedroom. The project connected Tavily for news retrieval, NVIDIA Nemotron™ on Nebius Token Factory for selecting and scripting stories, FLUX for visuals, and voice generation for narration. All those pieces came together into an experience with a clear audience and its own personality. The team’s repository explains how they built it.

Presenting the children’s news project and its explorable 1990s bedroom.

Another team worked on getting a robot arm to pick up a blue cube and place it on a target. They combined simulation, synthetic visual variations, and real demonstrations, with training on Nebius AI Cloud. Their write-up includes a useful lesson: changing how synthetic images looked couldn’t fix a difference in camera viewpoint. Real demonstrations made the biggest difference. Those are the kinds of details other builders can learn from when they try something similar.

There were industrial applications too. One team built a supplier research workflow to select a train component, investigate suppliers through chat, and compare a shortlist backed by research.

Across projects, people were applying similar tools to seemingly very different problems.

The moment I keep coming back to happened during judging. For the NVIDIA Nemotron award, there were two outstanding projects, and we had to make a quick call on which team would take home the prize. I still hope I made the right call, and the strength of these two builds reinforced to me the AI talent we have here in Europe.

Nebius HouseNebius House

Later in the week, we moved into Nebius House. For three days, we took over three floors at Mindspace on Krausenstraße, with meetings, coworking, breakfasts, a live broadcast studio, and evening events happening across the building. If you missed the livestream, you can check it out on YouTube. Here’s day 1 and day 2.

The House hosted an Open Source AI Salon, a healthcare and life sciences startup breakfast with NVIDIA, and an oversubscribed afterparty. Hackathon winners joined the celebrations, giving them more opportunities to hang out with the Nebius team, our partners, and other individuals at the heart of the European AI ecosystem.

As one attendee put it, we really “painted the town green”.

Gathering at Nebius House during GTC week

At GTCAt GTC

On Wednesday, we watched the keynote at Nebius House as a team, and then headed over to GTC to check out all the robots that seemed to have taken over the floor. Physical AI is definitely having a moment.

At the Nebius booth, I enjoyed talking with people who came over to see the demos. We had robots at our own booth too: robot arms playing piano with Token Factory. Behind the demo, Nemotron generated structured outputs that selected from recorded robot movements.

Then Thursday came, and the Nebius team was eagerly awaiting NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, to visit our booth. When he came over, we took pictures, he signed a T-shirt, and he gave us a tagline:

“Love Nebius. No tagline needed!”

What an end to the week.

See what came out of the hackathonSee what came out of the hackathon

Check out the 74 projects from the Nebius x NVIDIA hackathon, and if you’re building something too, come join us in the Nebius AI Builder Program.

Want to hang out with Nebius at a future event? Check out where you can find us on our events page.