Continuously weThe world of AI has seen changes. AI originated in the United States, but another AI model is gaining ground. The news making headlines these days is surprising. American companies once dominated this race. But the reality is different. Now, the picture is rapidly changing. A Chinese tech company Alibaba Group has released its open-source AI model Qwen It has achieved a milestone that has the entire tech industry reeling. In just the past six months, the Qwen family of models has seen a surge in sales. Over 3 billion downloads has been done, and this figure has even surpassed big companies like Google and Meta.
Photo : businesstimes
How big is this figure?
When it comes to measuring the popularity of a technology, download numbers become a major metric. This is even more important for open-source AI models, as developers around the world can freely download, customize, and use them to create new products. Popular open-source AI platforms Hugging Face According to the “State of Open Models” report released on August 14th, Google’s models were downloaded approximately 418 million times in 2026, while Meta’s models were downloaded 227 million times. Even if these two figures are combined, they still fall short of Alibaba’s Qwen.
Rread More: Anthropic introduces watermarking of Cloud-generated text to comply with EU law
Alibaba has released over 460 open-source models under the Qwen family to date. And most interestingly, developers around the world have created over 300,000 derivative models based on these models. This means that Qwen is no longer just a product, but an entire ecosystem, upon which others are building their own projects.
Why are developers liking Qwen so much?
If you’re involved in the world of AI development, you know that choosing a model isn’t just about performance, but also about price and the ease of customization. This is where Qwen wins hands down.The Hugging Face report clearly statesQwen has now become the “default choice” for developers looking to fine-tune a model and use it in their products. The report calls it one of the strongest foundations of the open AI ecosystem.
Another major reason is Qwen’s reach through Alibaba’s cloud service. The company has leveraged its cloud platform to bring Qwen to enterprise customers in emerging markets like Southeast Asia and Africa. Few companies have such access, and this is what sets Alibaba apart. Furthermore, Alibaba’s advantage isn’t limited to US companies. While China boasts strong competitors like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI’s Kimi, and MiniMax, Alibaba far surpasses them in terms of downloads.
Rread More: Why Are RAM Prices So High in 2026?
What is changing in the US-China AI race?
This entire development isn’t just a single company’s success story, but rather part of a larger picture of what’s often called the “US-China AI race.” It’s long been believed that American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are at the forefront of closed-source models, while Chinese companies focus on cheaper and easier-to-adopt models. Qwen’s success shows that this strategy is no longer limited to China; developers around the world are adopting it.
Interestingly, for a period this year, access to one of Anthropic’s models was temporarily blocked for foreign users, meaning that even constraints like export controls haven’t been able to slow the growth of Chinese AI companies.
American companies are also not sitting idle in the face of this growing competition. In the past few weeks, Meta and Nvidia have also launched new open AI models to attract the developer community. This means that the competition could intensify in the future.
Read More: Stripe-PayPal deal: Will Stripe buy PayPal?
What does this news mean for the common people?
What does this news mean for ordinary users or those in tech? In fact, whenever there’s such intense competition between big tech companies, ordinary users and developers directly benefit. More choice, lower prices, and the pace of innovation accelerates. For those interested in tech stocks or wondering where the next big wave of AI will come from, these figures are definitely worth paying attention to.
