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Vincent Chow

Alibaba Group Holding’s artificial intelligence strategy is defined by a commitment to open-source models, the company said on Tuesday, following a year of soaring adoption for its suite of AI services.
The statement came as Alibaba’s stock in New York rose more than 10 per cent on Monday, following news that its flagship Qwen family of AI models surpassed 700 million downloads on the developer platform Hugging Face, making it the world’s most widely adopted open-source AI system.
“A defining feature of Alibaba’s AI approach in 2025 has been its commitment to openness,” the company said. “Rather than gatekeeping capabilities, Alibaba has leaned into open-source software. This has helped developers and companies build faster and at lower cost.”
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Open-source models from Alibaba and other Chinese AI companies had caught up or “even pulled ahead” of their US counterparts in capabilities and adoption, according to a Stanford University report published last month.
Alibaba hailed the importance of the open-source approach, which allowed “building with the community”. It cited the case of Nvidia’s Cosmos-Reason1-7B, a model platform for physical AI, which was post-trained based on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct for embodied reasoning and physical-world understanding.
The Hangzhou-based giant kicked off last year by announcing it would invest 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) in AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years. This commitment was expanded at September’s Apsara conference, in which CEO Eddie Wu Yongming laid out a road map to developing artificial superintelligence, sending the company’s stock to a four-year high.
Qwen downloads in December exceeded eight other major open-source developers combined, including OpenAI, DeepSeek and Meta, according to Chinese open-source AI expert Nathan Lambert, citing Hugging Face figures.
“This sets up the position where dethroning Qwen in adoption in 2026 looks impossible overall,” he said in his Interconnects newsletter on January 7.
Alibaba and its affiliates also ramped up integration of Qwen models into new consumer products last year, including the Qwen AI assistant app and Ant Group’s health app “A-Fu”.
Charlene Liu, HSBC’s head of internet and gaming research for Asia-Pacific, said in a research note on Friday that Alibaba’s cloud services would see continued revenue growth as long as AI-related demand persisted.
In November, group chairman Joe Tsai outlined Alibaba’s monetisation strategy for its open-source models at an event in Hong Kong, explaining that the company did not “make money from AI” per se.
“We run a cloud computing business,” he said. “When you run models, you need to have cloud infrastructure... If people are running AI and they happen to want to use Alibaba Cloud, we have a whole suite of products from storage to data management to security to networking to containers.”
Uncertainty remains over whether Alibaba and other Chinese AI developers will be able to keep up with their richer US counterparts given a relative lack of access to computational resources.
On Saturday, Qwen team leader Lin Junyang said at a major industry event in Beijing that he was pessimistic about China’s chances of surpassing the US in the near term, so long as domestic compute was tied up in daily delivery and not going towards foundational research.


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Alibaba reaffirms open-source AI commitment as tech giant hails Qwen achievements

Leaning into the open-source approach has helped developers build AI applications faster and at lower cost, company says. Photo: Shutterstock

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China’s less than 20 per cent chance of exceeding the US is already a “highly optimistic” estimate, according to Alibaba’s Qwen team. Photo: Shutterstock

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Alibaba Cloud is the artificial intelligence and cloud computing services unit of Alibaba Group Holding. Photo: Shutterstock 

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‘Building with the community’ is crucial to the success of the Qwen family of large language models, company says


‘Building with the community’ is crucial to the success of the Qwen family of large language models, company says.


Alibaba reaffirms open-source AI commitment as tech giant hails Qwen achievements

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}‘Building with the community’ is crucial to the success of the Qwen family of large language models, company says

‘Building with the community’ is crucial to the success of the Qwen family of large language models, company says