Alibaba’s Qwen family of AI models has crossed 3 billion global downloads, a number that puts it ahead of virtually every open-source competitor in the large language model space.
The milestone cements Qwen’s position as the most downloaded open-source AI model family in the world, with the models now accounting for more than 50% of global open-source model downloads.
Growth that looks more exponential than linear
By January 2026, Qwen had racked up over 700 million downloads on Hugging Face alone, averaging roughly 1.1 million downloads per day during peak periods. By March, cumulative Hugging Face downloads had approached 1 billion.
Developers have been flocking to Qwen for fine-tuning and deployment, building an ecosystem of over 200,000 derivative models on Hugging Face.
