In Kazakhstan, the winners of the FAIO 2026 AI Olympiad have been determined.

On October 29, 2026, a prestigious award ceremony for the winners of the third International Team Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for school students — FAIO 2026 — was held at the SDU University campus in Kaskelen. 47 high school teams from 15 countries around the world shared a prize fund of 11,000,000 tenge.

The FAIO Olympiad, which started in 2024 as a local Kazakh championship, has grown over three seasons into a large-scale international tournament. In the 2026 online qualifying stage, more than 1,500 school students participated as part of over 570 teams from 28 countries and 125 cities. The competition for a spot in the final was extremely fierce: only 1 out of 12 teams advanced to the in-person stage.

The in-person final brought together 118 top participants representing Kazakhstan, Russia, Spain, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, the Philippines, Italy, Cyprus, Morocco, Romania, Armenia, Belarus, Mongolia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Over two competitive days, the teams solved eight extremely difficult practical problems in data analysis, machine learning, algorithms, and higher mathematics. In total, finalists submitted 3,484 solution submissions, while the built-in AI assistant on the platform processed 19,343 requests, totaling more than 22.9 million tokens.

The suspense lasted until the very last minutes of the tournament: on the second day of competition, 44 out of 47 teams changed their positions in the leaderboard. The Kazakhstani team Haileybury Astana School made a record-breaking jump, rising 24 places up.

The winners of the grand prize and the main award of 1,000,000 tenge were the team from the St. Petersburg Governor's Physics and Mathematics Lyceum No. 30: Ilya Gorunov, Yaroslav Shanin, and Anton Myachin. All three received a 100% scholarship for four years of study at SDU University, where the Olympiad itself took place. A total of 24 teams received monetary awards: three teams won gold with 1,000,000 tenge each, eight teams won silver with 500,000 tenge each, and 12 teams won bronze with 250,000 tenge each. Additionally, SDU University, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, symbolically allocated 30 scholarships for four years of study for 30 finalists from graduating classes, with the total amount of scholarships reaching $528,000.

When we launched FAIO three years ago, our goal was to show Kazakhstani school students that artificial intelligence is not a closed scientific laboratory, but a clear and engaging engineering discipline. Today, we see representatives of 15 countries at the in-person final in Almaty — from Spain and Morocco to Thailand and Mongolia. The fact that young people from across the continent compete equally for the title of the strongest proves that Kazakhstan has formed one of the strongest and most open ecosystems for developing young ML talents. FAIO breaks down barriers — we give every school student the opportunity to try themselves on real industry tasks, and this season exceeded all our expectations.

Adilkhan Toktaganov, co-founder of the FAIO Olympiad

The team format is the key distinguishing feature of FAIO. In the real AI industry, no one develops models alone: success depends on the synergy of a mathematician, programmer, and data engineer. The 2026 final at SDU University demonstrated a phenomenal level of participant preparation: extremely difficult problems on dimensionality reduction and data routing were solved at the level of strong Data Science professionals. The second competitive day completely overturned the leaderboard, showing the character and will of the finalists. We are proud of every participant and are confident that we will soon see the names of these young people in leading global technology laboratories..