Qwen hits nearly 1 billion cumulative downloads, far surpassing rivals like Meta Platforms’ Llama and DeepSeek, researchers say
2-MIN READ2-MIN ListenMinxiao Changin ShenzhenPublished: 10:00am, 10 Apr 2026Alibaba Cloud captured more than 50 per cent of global open-source model downloads as of March following the release of its Qwen 3.5 model series, a new report has found.The finding underscores the dominance of Chinese models in the global open-source artificial intelligence landscape, though some US companies including OpenAI and Nvidia are also making early gains.
Citing figures from developer platform Hugging Face, the researchers said Qwen alone generated 153.6 million downloads in February, more than double the combined total from the next eight major players, including Meta, DeepSeek and OpenAI.
