Alibaba Cloud’s flagship Qwen model family has achieved a significant milestone, surpassing 700 million downloads on the developer platform Hugging Face as of January 2026, according to a report by the South China Morning Post. This achievement positions Qwen as the world’s most widely used open-source AI system. The surge in Qwen’s adoption is attributed to Alibaba Cloud’s strategy of open-sourcing a diverse range of models, including lightweight versions with 600 million parameters and larger models boasting tens of billions of parameters.
In parallel, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek appears to be on the brink of unveiling a new model. Commercial Times highlights that a new project named “MODEL1” has emerged in the open-source community, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model released last December.
DeepSeek’s performance has garnered attention, particularly in Nikkei’s “AI Model Ratings,” which evaluate leading models in Japanese. The report indicates that DeepSeek’s model ranks ninth out of 92, standing out as the top performer among open-source models. It has outperformed offerings from major players such as Alibaba Group, Google, and OpenAI.
The influence of these Chinese AI models is increasingly palpable beyond their home shores. Nikkei notes that six of the top ten models developed by Japanese companies, including emerging players like ABEJA, are built on DeepSeek and Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen). Additionally, Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII) has adopted Qwen to streamline the organization of training data for its domestic AI development initiative known as LLM-jp.
This robust performance of Chinese AI models in international markets underscores their rising prominence in the global landscape, driven by both effective technology and collaborative initiatives across borders. As the demand for advanced AI solutions continues to grow, the role of companies like Alibaba Cloud and DeepSeek is expected to expand further, potentially shaping the future of AI development and deployment.
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