Alibaba Cloud Qwen series accounts for over 50% of global open-source model downloads, with a total download count approaching 1 billion times.

DeepFlowTech · 2026-04-10T06:27:28+00:00

According to The South China Morning Post, a report released by Interconnects AI shows that by 2026, downloads of Alibaba Cloud's Qwen series models have exceeded 50%, totaling 941 million times, surpassing competitors. Qwen's dominant position stems from the popularity of its low-cost, small-parameter versions. At the same time, in the US-China AI competition, open-source strategies have become key, with some companies shifting toward closed-source approaches for commercialization.

DeepFlowTech

2026-04-10 06:27:28

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Deep Tide TechFlow News. On April 10, according to a report by the South China Morning Post, the U.S. AI tracking organization Interconnects AI said that as of March 2026, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen series models have accounted for more than 50% of global open-source model download volume, with cumulative downloads reaching 942.1 million times—far exceeding competitors such as Meta Llama and DeepSeek. In just February alone, the Qwen downloads totaled 153.6 million times, surpassing the combined download totals of the eight major vendors ranked right after it.

The report noted that the formation of Qwen’s leading position is driven by the extremely high adoption rate of its small-parameter versions (fewer than 10 billion parameters), which allows developers to freely customize and deploy at low cost. Since the release of Qwen 2.5 in September 2024, Chinese models have begun to overtake mainstream U.S. open-source models such as Llama. After the release of Qwen 3.5 in February this year, the advantage has been further solidified.

Meanwhile, open-source strategies are becoming a key battleground in the AI competition between China and the United States. Meta has already abandoned its open-source route this year and instead released a closed-source flagship model, Muse Spark. Chinese companies such as Alibaba Cloud and Zhipu AI have also converted some of their latest models to closed-source in order to expand direct commercialization channels.

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