Amazon Science· 6 min read· Aug 10, 2026
AWS Trainium Frontier competition: Co-design models and kernels on purpose-built AI chips
The AWS Trainium Frontier competition invites researchers to co-design models and kernels on purpose-built AI chips, exploring the efficient frontier of model architectures on AWS Trainium. The competition provides a ~50M parameter baseline language model and challenges participants to modify everything, including architecture, optimizer, training loop, and custom NKI kernels, to optimize the model architecture and training throughput within a fixed time and compute budget. The goal is to find the balance between model capacity and training throughput, driving validation bits-per-byte low and downstream in-context learning capability high. The optimal architectures will differ from those designed for existing accelerators due to Trainium's unique hardware features. The practical implication for engineers building AI systems is the opportunity to discover new model architectures designed