Alibaba’s Qwen family of open-source AI models has surpassed 3 billion downloads worldwide over the past six months, putting it ahead of Meta Platforms and Alphabet in global open-model adoption, according to Hugging Face’s latest State of Open Models report. The report said Google’s open-source model downloads are projected at 418 million over the same period, while Meta’s trail at 227 million. Alibaba has open-sourced more than 460 Qwen models, and more than 300,000 derivative models have been built on top of them. Hugging Face described Qwen as a central part of the open AI ecosystem, saying it has become embedded in developers’ default workflows for fine-tuning and deployment. The surge also outpaces Chinese rivals including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI’s Kimi and MiniMax combined. Alibaba’s cloud distribution in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and Africa has helped drive adoption, while its strategy pairs free open-source models with cloud services for monetization. The rise of Qwen underscores how download and derivative-model counts have become key indicators of developer preference in the U.S.-China AI race, even if they do not directly translate into revenue.