Alibaba's Qwen AI Models Surpass 3 Billion Downloads, Outpacing Meta and Google

Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen family of open-weight artificial-intelligence models has accumulated more than 3 billion downloads globally over the past six months, according to the company, strengthening its position in the rapidly expanding open-model ecosystem.

Alibaba's Qwen AI models have surpassed 3 billion downloads, highlighting the growing global adoption of open-weight artificial intelligence. [Photo: Qwen Cloud Facebook]

Alibaba said Qwen has released more than 460 models and generated more than 300,000 derivative models.

Data from Hugging Face cited in the report showed Google's models with about 418 million downloads and Meta's models with about 227 million downloads in 2026.

Open models can be downloaded, customized and incorporated into new AI applications, making downloads and derivative models useful — although imperfect — indicators of developer adoption.

Alibaba's Qwen strategy reflects the growing importance of relatively inexpensive, customizable AI models in the global technology competition. The rapid growth of Qwen outside China suggests that Chinese AI companies are gaining traction among developers beyond their domestic market.