Alibaba's Qwen AI Models Dominate Global Open-Source Downloads with 50% Market Share

Alibaba's Qwen family of artificial intelligence models has secured more than half of all global open-source downloads, according to recent research. The Qwen series has accumulated close to 1 billion total downloads, significantly outpacing competitors such as Meta Platforms' Llama and DeepSeek. Data from the developer platform Hugging Face revealed that Qwen alone accounted for 153.6 million downloads in February 2024, a figure exceeding double the combined total of the next eight major players, which included Meta, DeepSeek, and OpenAI. This performance highlights the strong position of Chinese AI models within the international open-source ecosystem, even as U.S. firms like OpenAI and Nvidia begin to establish early traction. Alibaba Cloud made its latest flagship model series, Qwen 3.5, openly available in February, asserting its capabilities are competitive with leading U.S. models from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.