Alibaba's Qwen Hits 1B Downloads, Captures 50% of Open-Source AI Market

Alibaba Cloud's Qwen family of large language models has captured over 50% of global open-source AI model downloads, reaching nearly 1 billion cumulative downloads on Hugging Face as of March 2026.

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Alibaba Cloud's Qwen family of large language models has captured over 50% of the global open-source AI model download market, reaching nearly 1 billion cumulative downloads on the Hugging Face platform as of March 2026. This milestone follows the February 2026 release of Qwen 3.5, Alibaba's latest flagship model series. The data shows Qwen models generated 153.6 million downloads in February 2026 alone, more than double the combined total of the next eight major players including Meta, DeepSeek, and OpenAI. Qwen first overtook popular US models like Llama in total downloads on Hugging Face in the summer of 2025, with the decisive shift beginning in September 2024 with the release of Qwen 2.5. Alibaba Cloud has aggressively pursued an open-source strategy for Qwen, in contrast to the primarily closed or heavily restricted models from leading US AI labs. This dominance grants Alibaba significant influence over open-source AI development patterns, model architectures, and the surrounding ecosystem of tools and fine-tunes.