THE BORING ILLINI

The Boring Company’s Not-a-Boring Competition is an international engineering challenge created to accelerate innovation in tunneling technology. Organized by Elon Musk’s Boring Company, the competition brings together teams of university students, independent engineers, and innovators from around the world to design, build, and operate scaled-down tunnel-boring machines.

The competition was developed in response to a major real-world problem: modern tunneling is slow, costly, and inefficient. By encouraging teams to approach the challenge from first principles, The Boring Company aims to inspire new ideas that could dramatically improve the speed, accuracy, and affordability of underground construction.

During the event, teams transport their custom-built TBMs to the competition site and are tasked with creating a functional tunnel within a controlled environment. They are evaluated on several criteria, including tunneling speed, precision, structural quality, machine innovation, and operational safety. The overarching objective is to see which team can dig the fastest and most accurately while demonstrating breakthroughs in design and engineering.

Ultimately, the Not-a-Boring Competition serves as a proving ground for the next generation of tunneling technologies. It provides students and engineers with hands-on experience solving one of infrastructure’s hardest problems, while helping advance the broader mission of making underground transportation and utility systems more practical, scalable, and cost-effective.

Our goal at The Boring Illini is to push the boundaries of underground engineering by designing an innovative, efficient, and reliable tunneling system. Through this competition, we aim to contribute meaningful ideas to the future of sustainable infrastructure.