An Unexpected Leader in the AI Race: Alibaba Overtakes Meta and Google

China's Alibaba Group Holding has achieved an unexpected breakthrough in the artificial intelligence market through its family of open models (AI models with publicly available code and weights) called Qwen: over the past six months, these models have been downloaded more than 3 billion times worldwide. With this figure, Qwen has overtaken Meta Platforms, Google's parent company Alphabet, and other Chinese rivals to become the most downloaded AI model family in the world.

According to a report published on August 14 by Hugging Face, a leading platform for open-source AI models, Alibaba has released more than 460 models to the public, and its ecosystem has produced over 300,000 derivative versions. By comparison, over the same period Google's models were downloaded 418 million times and Meta's 227 million times.

Because open models allow developers to fine-tune them for their own needs and build new products on top of them, the number of downloads has become a measure of which technology developers trust most. This, in turn, has emerged as one of the metrics for gauging influence in the AI competition between the United States and China, as Chinese developers — including Alibaba — are actively promoting relatively cheap and flexible models.

Qwen, along with Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, is working to close the gap with closed-source models from US firms OpenAI and Anthropic. Export restrictions on chips and AI systems — such as the temporary block this summer on foreign users' access to Anthropic's Fable 5 model — do not appear to be slowing the pace of Chinese competitors.

The Hugging Face report notes that Qwen's download statistics have made it 'one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem': 'Qwen has become part of the standard workflow when developers decide which model to adapt and deploy,' the report states. A broad family of models creates a self-reinforcing ecosystem: the more developers use a model, the more derivative versions are created, which in turn attracts new users. Alibaba also delivers Qwen to enterprise customers in Southeast Asia and Africa through its own cloud platform, giving it a reach that many of its competitors lack.

In response, US tech giants have also stepped up their efforts: in recent weeks, Meta and Nvidia have both rolled out new open AI models amid intensifying competition among developers.