MUMBAI: Qwen is clearly having a download day. Alibaba Group Holding’s family of open-weight AI models has crossed 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, putting the ecosystem well ahead of models from Meta Platforms, Alphabet and other Chinese AI developers, according to figures cited by Alibaba and Hugging Face and reported by Bloomberg.
Alibaba said the Qwen ecosystem now spans more than 460 open-weight models and has produced over 300,000 derivative models, highlighting the extent to which developers are downloading, modifying and deploying the models for their own applications.
The scale becomes clearer when compared with other major AI model families. Hugging Face’s State of Open Models report, published on 14 August, showed Google models recording 418 million downloads in 2026, while Meta’s models reached 227 million.
Open-weight models allow developers to download and adapt AI systems rather than relying solely on closed models. Downloads and derivative models have increasingly become measures of how widely an AI model is being adopted and reused by developers.
Qwen’s rise also points to the growing influence of Chinese AI developers in the global open-model market. Alibaba, alongside companies including Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, has been working to close the performance gap with leading closed AI models from US companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Hugging Face described Alibaba’s Qwen ecosystem as one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem, noting that the model family has become a common starting point for developers looking to fine-tune and deploy AI systems.
Alibaba has further expanded Qwen’s reach through its cloud platform, offering access to enterprise customers in markets including Southeast Asia and Africa. Its broad model portfolio also creates a cycle in which developers can build derivative models that potentially attract more users to the ecosystem.
The battle is no longer simply about which company has the most powerful model. Increasingly, it is about which model developers choose to build on.
Meta and Nvidia have released new open AI models in recent weeks as technology companies compete to establish their systems as the underlying building blocks for the next generation of AI applications. Qwen’s 3 billion downloads, meanwhile, give Alibaba a substantial lead on the open-model download metric cited in the report.
