Qwen from Alibaba has surpassed the 3 billion download mark: why China's open models dominate
The open artificial intelligence ecosystem is undergoing a tectonic shift, and its epicenter is in China. Alibaba's Qwen family of models has reached a colossal milestone — over 3 billion downloads in the past six months. This is not just a number, but a marker of how rapidly the balance of power is changing in the global AI market.
The Chinese corporation has released more than 460 neural networks into the public domain, based on which developers worldwide have created around 300,000 derivative models. The scale is impressive, but even more telling is the analysis from the Hugging Face platform, which recently published its semi-annual report on the state of open models.
Hugging Face Data: A Clash of Titans
According to the platform's calculations, over seven months of the current year, Qwen was downloaded 2.05 billion times, with the number of derivative repositories reaching 151,448. For comparison, Google's figure stands at only 82,506. The gap with competitors is evident: Google's model downloads in 2026 are estimated at 418 million, while Meta's are at 227 million. It is important to emphasize that this statistics only accounts for activity within the Hugging Face ecosystem, excluding API requests and private deployments, making the real gap even more significant.
The report's authors rightly note that these figures should not be viewed as a direct indicator of market share or commercial usage. However, the momentum is striking: the number of Qwen derivative repositories grows by 180-210 daily. It is also telling that out of 28,531 GGUF conversions of these models on the platform, only 54 were created by Alibaba itself — the rest is community work. As aptly noted in the report, Qwen has become a standard part of the workflow for developers choosing a model for fine-tuning and deployment.
The Secret to Success: Strategy, Not Chance
Qwen's position is explained by three key factors: regular updates, coverage of all scales — from sub-billion versions to the giant Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters — and the Apache 2.0 license, which does not restrict modification or commercial use. The breadth of the model lineup proved decisive. Versions with fewer than 1 billion parameters account for 83% of all downloads in the platform's history, while neural networks over 100 billion account for only 1%. Labs focused on large LLMs are falling behind: Moonshot AI, which releases almost no models smaller than 70 billion, gathered only 37 million downloads over the year — roughly 55 times fewer than Qwen.
Alibaba also dominates the local deployment segment: its GGUF builds are downloaded 39.6 million times per month, while Gemma's figure is 20.8 million, and Llama's is only 7.5 million.
A New Balance of Power in Open AI
The report revealed a shift in the balance: in almost every month of the current year, the largest open model from China surpassed all U.S. releases in size. Its ceiling ranged from 754 billion to 2.78 trillion parameters, while for American competitors, it did not exceed 130 billion in five out of seven months. In China, 59% of models with more than 20 billion parameters are released under Apache 2.0, 22% under MIT, and none of them have restrictions on commercial use. For U.S. developers, the picture is different: 29% under Apache/MIT, 41% under proprietary terms, and 30% without a specified license.
Notably, in the United States, the leaders in the number of new open models were not AI labs but chip manufacturers: AMD and Nvidia each released over 200 repositories, leaving Google and Meta far behind.
My analysis: We are witnessing a fundamental shift. Chinese companies have realized that openness is not charity but a powerful tool for capturing the market and setting standards. By betting on Apache 2.0 and covering every niche — from edge to data centers — Alibaba is not just catching up with competitors but shaping a new reality where developers choose Qwen by default. The U.S. retains an advantage in infrastructure, but in the battle for developers' minds, China is already winning.