Web image analysis has witnessed an AI renaissance. The ILSVRC benchmark has been instrumental in providing a corpus and standardized evaluation. The NVIDIA AI City Challenge is envisioned to provide similar impetus to the analysis of image and video data that helps make cities smarter and safer. In its first year, this Challenge has focused on traffic video data. While millions of traffic video cameras around the world capture data, albeit low-quality, very little automated analysis and value creation results. Lack of labeled data, and trained models that can be deployed at the edge of the city fabric, ensure that most traffic video data goes through little or no automated analysis. Real-time and batch analysis of this data can provide vital breakthroughs in real-time traffic management as well as pedestrian safety. The NVIDIA AI City Challenge brought together 29 teams from universities in 4 continents to collaboratively annotate a 125 hour data set and then compete on detection, localization and classification tasks as well as traffic and safety application analytics tasks. The result is the largest high quality annotated data set, a set of models trained using NVIDIA AI City Edge to Cloud platform and ready to be deployed at the edge solving traffic and safety problems for cities worldwide.