Alibaba’s Qwen artificial intelligence models surpassed 3 billion downloads over the past six months, according to the company, putting the open-source ecosystem ahead of models from Meta and Google by download volume.
Alibaba said the Qwen ecosystem now includes more than 460 open-source models, while developers have created over 300,000 derivative models based on the technology. Data from Hugging Face shows Google’s models recorded around 418 million downloads in 2026, compared with 227 million for Meta’s models.
The figures highlight the growing role of open AI models, which developers can download, customize and reuse to build applications and new models. Hugging Face said Qwen’s usage has made it one of the largest foundations in the open AI ecosystem and part of developers’ workflows for fine-tuning and deployment.
Alibaba is also distributing Qwen through its cloud platform to enterprise customers in markets including Southeast Asia and Africa. The company’s momentum comes as Chinese AI firms seek to expand their global developer communities, while US technology companies including Meta and Nvidia increase their focus on open models.
The competition is increasingly shifting beyond model performance toward the size and activity of the ecosystems built around them.
Source: EntArabi
