Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global leader in IT services, consulting, and business solutions, declared the winners of the 2026 edition of its global coding competition, TCS CodeVita™.
Zhou Jingkai, 21, from the People’s Republic of China, secured the top honour. Vincente Opazo from Chile and Jorge Valdivia from Peru emerged as the first and second runners up. This year’s edition saw 146,922 participants, earning TCS a new Guinness World Records title for the world’s largest computer programming competition, surpassing its previous record of 2021.
Now in its 13th season, TCS CodeVita, continues to display some of the world’s brightest programming minds, pushing the boundaries of competitive coding excellence.
This year the competition saw a new mini competition being instituted. The 30 finalists appeared for an AI-assisted programming competition with a motive to understand the dynamics of Human – AI collaboration to solve complex programming problems. TCS provided the participants with frontier AI models comprising ChatGPT, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini to derive innovative solutions. This enabled TCS to capture in real time how humans make use of AI in roles of validator, collaborator or outsourcing partner.
Six Indian women finalists made it to the global top 30, the highest ever across all the editions thus far.
Categories and Winners
Best Women Coders - Tejaswini Singh, Lucknow
Best AI Coder - Zhou Jingkai, People’s Republic of China
Best Emerging Coder - Balashiva S, Chennai, India