Chinese Open-Weight AI Models Are Outpacing US Rivals in the Global South

Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen has 151,448 Hugging Face derivatives, a repository footprint 4.7 times Meta’s Llama and nearly double Google’s Gemma, with 39.6 million monthly GGUF downloads versus Llama’s 7.5 million. US firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic still gate access through APIs and subscriptions, a harder sell in cost-sensitive Global South markets where China’s freely shared models are spreading.