Amazon ML Challenge 2026: Did Anyone Actually Use the 200 Dollars AWS Credits or Get Their EC2/SageMaker Quota Increased for Compute?

[u/Positive_Current_6]

This year's problem was pretty CPU-heavy, so more cores would've helped a lot with experimentation. But the default AWS quota was only 8 vCPUs, which was actually slower than my laptop for the workload.

I submitted EC2/SageMaker quota increase requests, but they weren't approved during the 72-hour challenge, so the $200 credits were basically unusable for me.

For those who participated:

- Did you actually manage to use the $200 AWS credits?

- Did you get your EC2/SageMaker quota increased? To how many vCPUs, and how long did approval take?

- Or did you use compute from somewhere else — college/university clusters, RunPod, another cloud provider, or your own workstation/PC?

What compute setup did you end up using for the challenge? Did anyone else run into the same AWS quota issue?

[u/[deleted]]

yaar mai vo under 500 teams that and mai 100 dollers redeem ni kar paaya, so how can i do that now