Hugging Face's State of Open Models Report: Qwen Passed 3 Billion Downloads, More Than Google and Meta Combined by Roughly 5x
Hugging Face published its Summer 2026 State of Open Models report on 2026-08-14, showing Alibaba's Qwen family at roughly 2.045 billion downloads on the Hub in 2026 against 418 million for Google and 227 million for Meta; Alibaba's own cumulative figure crossed 3 billion over six months. Qwen has open-sourced 460+ models and spawned 300,000+ derivatives, which the report calls 'one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem.' The report also notes the largest open models from leading Chinese labs in 2026 generally carry more parameters than their US counterparts — the download gap is a licensing-and-scale gap, not just a popularity contest. For builders, this is the clearest single datapoint yet that Qwen is now the default fine-tune base, which makes tooling, LoRA availability, and quant coverage self-reinforcing.
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