Qai and Hugging Face Hackathon in Doha Names Red-Tide Warning Tool as Winner

The second- and third-placed teams built Qafal, which compares "then and now" photographs of Qatar and adds chat and original source pages, and Rasad, an AI monitoring system to detect drones near the country's critical sites, according to the event page Hugging Face hosts for the competition. Fifteen teams reached the final, including entries named Handshake, Nutri, Kafwain and Trust.

The hackathon gives Qai a visible role in developing local talent as it builds its business around compute and infrastructure. Qatar has put desalinated water and critical-site security near the top of its priorities, and two of the three winning projects address those directly.

The event ran in person from 5 to 7 November at a co-working space on Abdulla Bin Thani Street in Doha, with a 48-hour build window from Thursday evening to Saturday evening. Teams of two to four were admitted by application. The challenge was kept secret until kickoff, and projects had to be built with open-source tools on Hugging Face and submitted as live demos. Judges were drawn from Qai and Hugging Face. Several teams have published their work on Hugging Face, including SafeSite Qatar, a tool that checks whether construction workers are wearing protective equipment.

Qai was set up in December 2025 as a subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority, the state's sovereign wealth fund. Its mandate is to develop, manage and invest in AI infrastructure in Qatar and abroad and to provide access to high-performance computing. Unlike its counterparts in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, it does not plan to build its own large language models. The hackathon was billed as the first in a series, and the organisers have not yet given a date for the next one.