According to a Hugging Face Inc. report published on August 14, Alibaba's Qwen family of artificial intelligence models was downloaded more than 3 billion times worldwide over the past six months. That figure exceeds the download counts for comparable open models from Alphabet (Google) and Meta Platforms during the same period.
Numbers and ecosystem
Alibaba says it has made over 460 Qwen models publicly available, and its ecosystem already includes more than 300,000 derived models. Hugging Face's data show that in 2026 Google’s models were downloaded 418 million times and Meta’s models 227 million times.
Why this matters
Open models can be downloaded, customized, and used as building blocks for new AI products, so download and derivative counts are a strong indicator of which technologies developers rely on. Those metrics have become a measure of influence in the AI competition between the United States and China: wider adoption leads to more developers, more fine-tuning, and more deployments.
Chinese strategy and global reach
The report highlights that Chinese developers, including Alibaba, are pursuing high-performance, relatively inexpensive and easily adaptable models to expand their share. Qwen’s growth suggests this approach is gaining traction outside China as well. Alibaba has supported adoption by delivering Qwen to enterprise customers via its cloud platform in regions such as Southeast Asia and Africa, reaching markets that some competitors do not access to the same extent.
Hugging Face notes that Qwen has become a default part of developer workflows when deciding which models to fine-tune and deploy. A broad model family can create a self-reinforcing ecosystem: the more developers use the models, the more derived variants are produced, which in turn attracts additional users.
Export controls and global competition
The report also suggests that export controls on chips and AI systems — for example the temporary ban this summer on foreign access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 model — do not appear to have substantially slowed Chinese competitors. Qwen, Moonshot, DeepSeek and other Chinese model developers are attempting to reproduce leading-model performance to narrow the gap with closed American models such as those from OpenAI Inc. and Anthropic PBC.
Responses from US tech companies
In response to increasing competition, U.S. technology companies have also released new open AI models. The report notes that in recent weeks Meta and Nvidia Corporation, among others, unveiled new open models as competition intensifies for developers and ecosystem share.
