Alibaba AI beats Meta, Google as Qwen models top 3 billion downloads

Alibaba has accomplished a new breakthrough after surpassing both domestic peers and US competitors including Meta and Google.

Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen family has become the world’s leading open-weight AI model family as these models have amassed over 3 billion global downloads over a six-month period.

According to Hugging Face metrics for 2026 report, Alibaba far outpaced major US rivals with 3+ billion downloads across 460-plus open-sourced models followed by Google’s 418 million downloads and Meta with 227 million downloads.

The Qwen ecosystem has spawned over 300,000 derivative models, making it one of the largest foundations in the open AI ecosystem.

“Qwen has become part of the default workflow for developers deciding what models to fine-tune and deploy,” the report said.

Qwen has integrated into the default workflow for global developers choosing models to fine-tune, customize, and deploy. The company leverages its cloud platform to distribute Qwen to enterprise customers globally, particularly in markets like Southeast Asia and Africa.

China developers are gaining international popularity as they offer capable and relatively cheap and adaptable models that rival closed-source AI models, including Anthropic and OpenAI.

US export controls on chips and AI systems appear unable to halt the rapid progress of Chinese AI model builders like Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI.