When people talk about the AI race, the names that come up are usually OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. But when it comes to models developers can actually download and build on themselves, a different company has pulled ahead, and by a wide margin.
Alibaba says its Qwen family of open-weight models has crossed 3 billion downloads worldwide over the past six months. That puts it ahead of some of the biggest names in the industry, including Meta and Google.
The gap shows up clearly in Hugging Face’s numbers for 2026. Google’s open models sit around 418 million downloads, and Meta comes in at roughly 227 million, according to Hugging Face’s latest State of Open Models report.
Qwen isn’t just one popular model either. Alibaba has released more than 460 Qwen models total, and developers have built over 300,000 derivative models on top of them.
Alibaba’s Qwen and Developers
These download figures carry weight because open models work fundamentally differently from closed AI services. Developers can grab them, adapt them for a specific job, fine-tune them with their own data, and turn them into the foundation for something completely new.
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Every single download has the potential to become something else entirely. That seems to be exactly what’s happening with Qwen, just at a massive scale. Hugging Face calls it one of the biggest pillars holding up today’s open AI ecosystem, noting that developers increasingly reach for Qwen first when deciding what to fine-tune or deploy.
There’s a compounding effect at work here, too. More developers building on Qwen means more specialized versions show up in the wild. Those specialized models then pull in even more developers, which keeps expanding the whole ecosystem further. Alibaba has another card to play as well: its cloud business.
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The company is pushing Qwen out to enterprise customers beyond China, including businesses across Southeast Asia and Africa, putting its models directly in front of companies that might otherwise default to American alternatives.
China’s open AI
Qwen’s rise also adds a new layer to the broader AI rivalry between China and the US. Alibaba isn’t working alone in this. Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax are all pushing out increasingly capable models of their own, each trying to close the performance gap with closed systems from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Competition for developer attention keeps intensifying, too. Meta and Nvidia have both released new open models in recent weeks, giving developers even more choices about what to build on.
Still, crossing 3 billion downloads shows Alibaba has already found a massive audience for Qwen well beyond China’s borders. The next major battle in AI might not come down to who builds the smartest model at all. It could come down to whose model the rest of the industry decides to build with.
