Alibaba's ModelScope and OSChina's MoArk compete as Chinese alternatives to Hugging Face, with ModelScope hosting over 170,000 open models and MoArk about 20,000.
huggingface open-source
| Source: Techmeme | Original article
Alibaba's ModelScope and OSChina's MoArk are competing to become Chinese alternatives to Hugging Face, with ModelScope offering over 170,000 open models and MoArk about 20,000.
Alibaba’s ModelScope and OSChina’s MoArk are positioning themselves as the homegrown equivalents of the U.S.‑based hub Hugging Face, which was blocked in China in 2023. The ban opened a clear market for domestic model repositories, and both platforms are racing to capture Chinese‑language developers behind the Great Firewall.
ModelScope, launched by Alibaba’s DAMO Academy in 2022, now lists more than 170,000 open models and claims a user base of roughly 250 million. The service is tightly integrated with Alibaba Cloud and offers free compute credits to academic users, helping it amass around two million monthly downloads, according to internal figures. MoArk, a Beijing‑based startup founded in 2021 and backed by a $30 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital China in early 2023, hosts about 20,000 models. Its differentiator is a team of engineers who fine‑tune models specifically for Chinese‑made hardware and datasets.
The competition matters because open‑source model hubs are critical infrastructure for AI development. With Hugging Face inaccessible, Chinese engineers need a reliable source for pretrained models, tools, and community support. The scale of ModelScope’s catalogue suggests it could become the de‑facto standard for large‑scale deployments, while MoArk’s focus on localized optimization may appeal to firms seeking tighter integration with domestic chips and regulatory compliance.
What to watch next is how the two platforms evolve their ecosystems. Key indicators will be the growth of model uploads, the rollout of developer incentives such as compute credits, and any further funding rounds that could accelerate feature development. Regulators may also shape the landscape, either by tightening controls on foreign AI services or by endorsing domestic alternatives. The outcome will influence how Chinese AI research and commercial projects source and share models in the coming years.
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