Alibaba’s Qwen gains ground in Japan’s AI model race

Japanese startups are increasingly building on Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen open-source models, with Abeja’s QwQ-32B and other Qwen-based systems ranking among the top performers in Japanese AI benchmarks. Alibaba Cloud plans to localize Qwen deployment, citing data sovereignty concerns, and aims to expand to over 1,000 Japanese corporate users within three years.