Alibaba's Qwen Models Pass 3B Global Downloads, Eclipsing Meta and Google Combined

Alibaba's open-weight Qwen family has accumulated more than 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, versus Google's 418M and Meta's 227M in 2026 per Hugging Face's state-of-open-models tally, according to Bloomberg. Qwen now spans 460+ open-sourced models with 300,000+ derivatives, and has become 'part of the default workflow for developers deciding what models to fine-tune and deploy.' The gap deepens the narrative that Chinese labs — Qwen alongside Moonshot, DeepSeek and others — now dominate the open-weights layer.