Alibaba’s Qwen was the most-downloaded open model family on Hugging Face in the first seven months of 2026, with more than 3 billion downloads, according to Alibaba and an August 14 report from Hugging Face.

The report said Google’s open models had 418 million downloads and Meta’s had 227 million on the platform in the same period.

Alibaba said Qwen had released more than 460 open-weight models and produced more than 300,000 derivative models.

Alibaba Cloud said Qwen was a family of large language and multimodal models for the open-source community.

Hugging Face, a platform based in the US for sharing AI models, counts downloads based on GET or HEAD requests for selected model files such as config.json.

It said activity on its Hub is only one sign of ecosystem development, not a measure of total market use.

Hugging Face also said Qwen’s Apache 2.0 licensing made it easier to modify, redistribute, and use commercially.

Alibaba has tied AI demand to its cloud business.

In March, it said Cloud Intelligence Group revenue rose 36% year on year, while AI-related product revenue posted triple-digit growth for a 10th straight quarter, with Qwen central to its AI offering.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

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