❯ Alibaba’s ModelScope and OSChina’s MoArk vie to become China’s Hugging Face

Two platforms by sizeAccording to Rest of World’s Viola Zhou, Alibaba’s ModelScope and OSChina’s MoArk are competing to become China’s alternative to Hugging Face. ModelScope hosts more than 170,000 open models, while MoArk hosts about 20,000.

Why a local platformHugging Face is the main site where developers worldwide download and share open AI models, but access from mainland China is unreliable. Chinese open models have grown rapidly in global influence, with DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi often publishing to domestic platforms as well. ModelScope, backed by Alibaba Cloud, lets users run and fine-tune models directly on the cloud, while OSChina has long run a domestic open-source code hosting community.

Who owns the download gatewayA model hosting platform looks like just a warehouse, but it decides where developers discover models and which cloud they deploy on. Alibaba uses ModelScope to steer model users to Alibaba Cloud, a classic case of free services driving paid compute. Once that gateway is taken, other domestic cloud providers will find it harder to pull developers onto their own platforms.

▪ SIGNALOpen models are free; the fight is over where developers first download them, because that’s often where they first pay for compute.