12 models · on the curve since 2023
Alibaba (Qwen)
Qwen’s durable position is ubiquity: the most downloaded open-weight family, the default base thousands of teams fine-tune, wired into Alibaba Cloud’s distribution across Asia. The models commoditise; the ecosystem around them is the moat.
What would change this readAnother open family displaces Qwen as the default base to fine-tune, or Alibaba Cloud loses its regional distribution edge.
- Recent cadence
- 6 in last 12 mo
- 4 the year before
- Landmark density
- 4 / 12
- defining releases
- Weights
- Open + closed
- Qwen3.7-Max flagship
Trains and serves on
Its own cloud — Qwen is built inside Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, so the lab and the datacentre are the same company. In May 2026 its T-Head unit unveiled the Zhenwu M890, an in-house accelerator with 144GB of HBM3 on a domestic 7nm process, and demonstrated Qwen3.7-Max running on it. What the flagship was TRAINED on has never been disclosed.
ConcentrationAlone among these labs it owns the whole stack — silicon design, datacentres, cloud and model — yet its frontier training capacity still rests on NVIDIA parts gated by both US export policy and Chinese import approval.
Flagship, per million tokens
$2.50 in $7.50 out
qwen3.7-max, international region
Was
$0.86 / $3.44
Qwen3-Max at launch · Sep 2025
- Weights
- Split, and the split is the story. The open tier is genuinely Apache-2.0 down to 35B mixture-of-experts models with very long context. The flagship is not: qwen3.7-max has no published weights and is sold only through Alibaba Cloud.
- Where you buy it
- Model Studio and Bailian · HuggingFace · ModelScope · AWS Bedrock · Microsoft Foundry · OpenRouter
- Structure
- A programme inside a public company, not a startup. Alibaba Group is dual-primary listed on the New York and Hong Kong exchanges, so Qwen carries no separate funding or valuation of its own.
- Revenue
- Cloud Intelligence revenue was RMB 41.6B (US$6.0B) for the quarter to 31 Mar 2026, up 38%. AI-related product revenue reached RMB 9.0B in that quarter, about 30% of external cloud revenue, annualising past RMB 35.8B (~US$5.2B). Qwen itself is not broken out.
- People
- 126,661 across Alibaba Group (30 Sep 2025); the Qwen team is not disclosed separately
Biggest single dependencyIts flagship is closed-weight and monetised solely through its own cloud, which puts revenue, compute supply and chip roadmap on one balance sheet exposed to a single import-approval regime.
No 2024 flagship price could be verified from a primary source, so the comparison above starts at Sep 2025 — on that basis the flagship line has moved UP while the previous generation was cut by about half. Alibaba holds roughly 36% of Moonshot AI per its own 2024 filing, near-certainly diluted since. The reported Qwen3.8-Max preview appears only in aggregator sources and is not confirmed by Alibaba.
Hover any point to read the release. The y-axis is qualitative; only the x-axis carries dates.
- Default open base
- Reach for Qwen2.5 as a widely-supported base to fine-tune (Sep 2024).
- Permissive license
- Pick Qwen3 when Apache 2.0 terms matter for shipping (Apr 2025).
- Open reasoning
- Use QwQ for open reasoning without a closed API (Nov 2024).
- Feb 2026 Qwen3.5 397B mixture-of-experts flagship
- Apr 2025 Qwen3 Apache 2.0 family with hybrid thinking
- Sep 2024 Qwen2.5 Broad size lineup, widely fine-tuned
- Sep 2023 Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) First public release
Full release logall 12, newest first
- 2026
- Jul Qwen3.8-Max Preview 2.4T-parameter multimodal, previewed at WAIC — a preview, not general availability
- Jun Qwen3.7-Plus Vision plus deep reasoning with tool invocation
- May Qwen3.7-Max Proprietary max tier
- Apr Qwen3.6 / Omni Mixed open and proprietary, any-modality
- Feb Qwen3.5 ◆ 397B mixture-of-experts flagship
- 2025
- Sep Qwen3-Next Ultra-sparse MoE architecture
- Apr Qwen3 ◆ Apache 2.0 family with hybrid thinking
- Jan Qwen2.5-Max Large MoE flagship
- 2024
- Nov QwQ-32B Open reasoning model
- Sep Qwen2.5 ◆ Broad size lineup, widely fine-tuned
- Jun Qwen2 Second generation
- 2023
- Sep Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) ◆ First public release
- Parent
- Alibaba Cloud
- HQ
- Hangzhou, China
- First launch
- 2023
- Flagship
- Qwen3.7-Max
- Weights
- Mixed: open tier, closed flagship
- Also builds
- Tongyi, ModelScope
- Known for
- Most-used open family
Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) is the model family from Alibaba Cloud, headquartered in Hangzhou. First launched in 2023, it is among the most widely used open-weight families globally, with most releases under the permissive Apache 2.0 license alongside proprietary flagships.