ACM A.M. Turing Award is a annual academic recognizing excellence in Technology. Organized by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), it covers the Global region. Established in 1966.
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is the oldest and most prestigious honor of the Association for Computing Machinery, presented annually since 1966 to individuals whose technical contributions have had lasting importance to computing. Often described — including by ACM itself — as the 'Nobel Prize in Computing,' it is named for Alan M. Turing and selected by an ACM awards committee from confidential nominations submitted by members of the computing community. Recent laureates map directly onto today's deep-tech agenda: the 2025 award went to Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard for founding quantum information science, and past recipients include reinforcement-learning pioneer Richard Sutton and deep-learning pioneer Yann LeCun.
There is a single award each year, carrying a $1,000,000 prize with financial support provided by Google, plus travel to the ACM Awards Banquet each June where it is presented. A Turing Award is a career-defining recognition rather than a competitive trophy: laureates' work — from public-key cryptography to the internet's protocols to modern AI — becomes part of the permanent canon of the field, and the award is widely reported far beyond academia.
You cannot apply for a Turing Award; candidates must be nominated. A nomination is free and is submitted through ACM's online form by a recognized member of the community (ideally not from the candidate's own organization), with a 500–1,000-word statement and supporting letters from at least 4 and at most 8 endorsers drawn from a range of institutions. ACM advises that successful nominations center on one outstanding, trend-setting technical achievement, explained in terms a non-specialist can understand, with clear evidence of long-term influence. The most recent nomination deadline was December 15, and the cycle repeats annually.