With its sights firmly set 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. The 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 announced three major strategic developments that signal a new benchmark for the industry.

Hugging Face: KIEFER’s Open-Source Debut

KIEFER officially unveiled Hugging Face, its first internally developed open-source protocol. The initiative reflects the company’s commitment to collaborative development and engagement with the global developer community, promoting transparency and the open exchange of technical expertise.

Sophea K1: Greece’s First Open-Source Large Language Model

A major milestone for Greek artificial intelligence was the announcement of Sophea K1, a 28-billion parameter Large Language Model (LLM) designed specifically for the Greek language.

• Accessibility: The model is publicly 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 strong results in Social Sciences (85.70%), STEM (82.97%), and Humanities (82.38%).
• Next-Gen Roadmap: KIEFER confirmed that a next-generation model, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA and based on the Nemotron architecture, is already in progress and is expected to launch by September 2026.

Access to Greece’s First Sovereign AI Data Center

In a significant boost for participants, all seven hackathon teams will gain privileged access to Greece’s first sovereign AI data center. The facility is scheduled to go live in October 2026 and will allow teams to deploy their solutions on national-scale sovereign AI infrastructure from day one.

Hackathon Teams and Development Environment

The seven selected teams are currently working under high-performance computing conditions, leveraging NVIDIA B200 Tensor Core GPUs to build advanced applications in real-world scenarios:

• The Mandalorians
• Miru
• Big O No
• Tenkai
• MEDΩ
• TentaFlow
• Magenta Pistols

They are supported by expert engineers from NVIDIA and KIEFER AI, who provide mentorship aimed at transforming innovative ideas into market-ready proof-of-concept applications.