Alibaba’s Qwen AI model family has crossed 3 billion cumulative global downloads, making it the world’s most downloaded open AI model, according to a report published by Hugging Face on August 14.
BABA stock gained 1.35% on the news. META fell 0.86% and GOOG dropped 0.12%.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited, BABA
On Hugging Face alone, Qwen pulled in roughly 2.045 billion downloads in 2026. Google’s models came in at 418 million. Meta managed 227 million.
Those Hugging Face numbers don’t even include China’s ModelScope platform, so the real reach is larger than the headline figures suggest.
Alibaba has released more than 460 Qwen models as open source. That library has since spawned over 300,000 derivative models built by outside developers.
On Hugging Face specifically, developers have created 151,448 models derived from Qwen. That’s 2.6 times the number derived from Meta models and 4.7 times the repositories tied to Llama.
The download numbers tell only part of the story. More developers using Qwen means more derivative models, which draws in more users. It’s a cycle that Alibaba has been quietly building for a while.
The company has also pushed Qwen through its cloud platform to enterprise customers in Southeast Asia and Africa, giving it distribution that many rivals don’t have.
Hugging Face’s report described Qwen as “one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem” and said it has “become part of the default workflow for developers deciding what models to fine-tune and deploy.”
Qwen sits alongside DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax as Chinese model builders closing the gap with US closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The Hugging Face report flagged another trend: Chinese labs are releasing larger models than their US peers.
In 2026, the largest Chinese open models ranged from 754 billion to 2.78 trillion parameters per month. The largest US open models stayed below 130 billion parameters during most of the same period.
Parameter count isn’t a direct measure of intelligence or efficiency, especially with mixture-of-experts architectures. But the scale gap is hard to ignore.
Chinese developers have also gone with permissive licensing. Of the 178 Chinese models with more than 20 billion parameters tracked in the report, 59% used the Apache 2.0 license and 22% used MIT. None carried non-commercial restrictions.
US tech companies are taking note. Meta and Nvidia have both released new open AI models in recent weeks as competition for developer mindshare heats up.
Alibaba’s Qwen surpassing 3 billion downloads marks a shift in where developers are choosing to build.
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