Meta and Google just got beaten by an AI giant you might not expect

The AI race usually revolves around familiar names like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. But when it comes to models developers can actually download and build upon, another company has raced to the front — and by quite some distance. Alibaba says its Qwen family of open-weight AI models has crossed 3 billion downloads globally over the past six months. That puts Qwen ahead of some of the biggest names in AI, including models from Meta and Google.

The difference is especially striking in Hugging Face data for 2026. Google’s open models have recorded around 418 million downloads, while Meta sits at roughly 227 million, according to Hugging Face’s latest State of Open Models report. Qwen, meanwhile, is becoming much more than one popular model. Alibaba has released more than 460 Qwen models, and developers have created over 300,000 derivative models from them.

Developers are building on Qwen, not just downloading it

Those download numbers matter because open models work differently from closed AI services. Developers can take them, customize them for a particular job, fine-tune them with their own data, and use them as the foundation for entirely new AI products. In other words, every download can become something else. That appears to be happening with Qwen at a huge scale. Hugging Face describes it as one of the biggest foundations of today’s open AI ecosystem, with the model family increasingly becoming a go-to choice for developers deciding what they want to fine-tune or deploy.

It can also create something of a snowball effect. More developers using Qwen means more specialized versions of it become available. Those models can then attract even more developers, further expanding the ecosystem. Alibaba has another advantage here: its cloud business. The company is bringing Qwen to enterprise customers outside China, including markets across Southeast Asia and Africa, potentially putting its models in front of businesses that might otherwise gravitate toward American alternatives.

China’s open AI push is getting difficult to overlook

Qwen’s growth also adds another dimension to the AI rivalry between China and the US — Alibaba isn’t alone. Chinese companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, are all developing increasingly capable models while trying to narrow the performance gap with leading closed systems from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

The fight for developers is only getting busier. Meta and Nvidia have both introduced new open AI models in recent weeks, giving developers even more options when deciding what technology to build around. For Alibaba, however, reaching 3 billion downloads shows Qwen has already found an enormous audience beyond its home market. The next big AI battle may not simply be about who builds the smartest model; it could be about whose model everyone else chooses to build with.