NVIDIA Inception · Microsoft AI Cloud Partner · RAKTN

Train your own model and ship it to production

Eight weeks on a live A100 cluster. You leave with a working application running on a model you fine-tuned yourself, a Microsoft certification, and a published listing on the Microsoft Marketplace.

Cohort 1 starts 12 October 2026 · 20 seats

Five things you walk away with

You build the first three by hand. Microsoft verifies the fourth. The fifth starts earning.

01

Your own model

An open 27B model fine-tuned on your domain, with a registry card: weights, metrics, licence, version.

02

A production app

A chat over your documents with retrieval and citations. Deployed to the cloud, reachable by link, running on your model.

03

An eval suite

A test suite that catches hallucinations and regressions before release and blocks the deploy when quality drops.

04

Certification

Microsoft AI-103. The badge is published on LinkedIn and verifiable by any employer.

05

A marketplace listing

Your own offer in the Microsoft catalogue, where enterprise buyers look for contractors.

Eight weeks

A working application exists by the end of week one — before any theory. From there you take it apart layer by layer and replace each layer with your own.

Week 1
Your first cloud applicationPython, git, Docker, access. Deploy the chat template, load your documents, get a live link
Week 2
How document retrieval worksChunking, vector and hybrid search, citations, the prompt layer
Week 3
Cost and latencyTokens and delays as a design constraint. Caching, choosing the right model per task
Week 4
Fine-tuningQLoRA on a 27B model: data collection, the run, the usual ways to break it and how to catch them
Week 5
Your own endpointServe the model on vLLM, wrap it in a compatible API, swap it in for the vendor's
Week 6
Quality gatesBuild an eval suite and make it a release gate. This is the first thing interviewers ask about
Week 7
Agents and toolsMulti-step scenarios, calling external systems, Model Context Protocol, failure recovery
Week 8
Project defencePresent the system to a technical reviewer and explain its limits to a non-technical executive

Three tracks run in parallel

Engineering is the main one. The other two take half an hour a week and run in the background, so everything lands at the same time.

Track 1

Engineer

Eight weeks of project work: from a stock template to your own model in production with measured quality.

Track 2

AI-103 certification

An AI tutor inside your workspace walks you through the exam domains, remembers your mistakes and returns to weak spots. The next domain stays locked until the previous one is cleared.

Track 3

Microsoft partnership

Entity verification takes weeks, so the application goes in from week two. By graduation your offer is live in the catalogue.

Real hardware, not a simulator

Fine-tuning cannot be learned in theory. Every student gets a dedicated 40 GB slice of an NVIDIA A100 on the Lambda cluster, a partner of the NVIDIA Inception programme. No queue for a card and no neighbour eating your memory.

A 27-billion-parameter base model is available around the clock through a shared endpoint: your applications and your tutor run on it. Training slots hold QLoRA of the same model — enough for fifteen to thirty full runs per person.

AcceleratorNVIDIA A100 80 GB
Base model27B, always on
Training slot40 GB
Slot hours per student179
Full fine-tuning runs15–30
Graduation run8 × A100, 640 GB
EnvironmentvLLM · Jupyter · Docker

What this work sells for on the Microsoft catalogue

Two live listings from the Microsoft Marketplace. Both cover exactly what you learn in the first five weeks.

MINDIT SERVICES SRL$18,000

RAG Implementation: 4-Wk Proof of Concept

A custom chatbot on Azure OpenAI with advanced RAG, integrated with the client's systems. Four weeks.

Zure€27,639

Azure AI RAG & Enterprise Search

An enterprise document search MVP. The listing names the stack: Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Search, Bot Framework, Azure Storage. Four weeks.

This is a market reference, not an income guarantee. We take you to the point of publishing your own listing and explain both routes: a listing-only offer where the deal closes directly with the client, and a transactable offer billed through Microsoft. What happens next depends on Microsoft and on you.

Who is hiring right now

The shortage is not in theory but in delivery: there are three times fewer people who can take a model to a working system than there are open roles.

3.2 : 11.6M open positions against 518K qualified candidates
1.3MAI job openings created in two years, per LinkedIn
$350–550Kestimated annual package for a Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI

In Microsoft job postings the keyword is Azure AI Foundry, usually alongside Copilot Studio. They are not hiring researchers but engineers who assemble and deploy agents. The new AI-103 exam is built on exactly that.

At OpenAI the largest engineering role is Forward Deployed Engineer. The loop consists of coding on agentic scenarios, system design under cost and latency constraints, and a conversation with a non-technical executive. Week eight of this course is built to that list.

Deploying a model inside the client's own perimeter is valued separately: banks, healthcare and the public sector do not send data to a public API. That cannot be learned on a course that lives on a single cloud key.

Price

One price for eight weeks. Compute, exam preparation and support through to publishing your listing are included.

$1,800
first cohort · $2,400 thereafter
  • 179 hours of a 40 GB A100 training slot
  • A 27B base model available around the clock
  • 8 weeks of instruction in a group of up to 20
  • AI-103 preparation with a personal tutor
  • A graduation run on an eight-accelerator node
  • Code and project review at every stage

Paid separately

AI-103 examdirectly to Microsoft
Your own Azure subscription$30–60 per course
Partner Center registrationper Microsoft rules

Spend on your own Azure subscription stays small because the heavy runs happen on our cluster, not in your cloud. An Azure billing profile is required at intake — week one starts with it.

What you need coming in

We do not require experience with models. We require that you can write code and read logs.

  • Python at the level of confidently reading and editing someone else's code
  • Command line, git, a working understanding of Docker
  • An Azure account with a billing profile attached
  • English sufficient to read documentation
  • 10–12 hours a week, four of them synchronous
  • A laptop; all compute runs on our cluster

Apply for the first cohort

Selection is a 30-minute technical interview: we go through your code and discuss which problem your graduation project will solve.

20 seats remaining · starts 12 October 2026

Who runs the academy

A transnational group working in applied AI, sovereign edge computing and industrial automation.

United States

HYBT Technologies, Inc.

Newark, Delaware. The group's technology hub and vendor partnership entity. Member of NVIDIA Inception — the source of the academy's compute.

United Kingdom

Digital Qazaqstan LTD

London. Intellectual property, research and publishing. Member of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program.

United Arab Emirates

AL SAFI FZE

Umm Al Quwain Free Trade Zone. MENA operations hub, licensed for AI development and AI education. Operator of the academy.

Partner programmes: NVIDIA Inception — access to compute infrastructure and the NVIDIA ecosystem. Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program — publisher status in the commercial marketplace, through which graduates publish their own offers. RAKTN — regional technology partnership.

These programmes publish no public member directories, so confirmations are issued by letter on request: [email protected].