China is winning the open source AI race — but a US company still controls everything underneath

Hugging Face data from its Spring 2026 report reveals that Chinese AI models now lead in both monthly and total downloads on the platform, surpassing US models for the first time. Chinese models accounted for 41% of downloads between February 2025 and February 2026 versus 36.5% for the US. DeepSeek R1's viral success catalyzed a wave of open model releases from Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and others, while Alibaba's Qwen has overtaken Meta's Llama as the most widely deployed self-hosted LLM. Despite China's lead at the model layer, Nvidia continues to dominate the underlying hardware infrastructure, with most AI models still designed to run on Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia is also expanding its software presence on Hugging Face with over 350 repositories. Chinese companies like Alibaba are investing in domestic inference chips to reduce US hardware dependence, but those efforts remain early-stage.