---
title: "The Future of the Global Open-Source AI Ecosystem: From DeepSeek to AI+"
description: "This third and final article in a series examines how Chinese AI organizations are shaping an open-source ecosystem after DeepSeek R1's January 2025 release. It argues that open sharing of models, papers, deployment infrastructure, and techniques has become the dominant near-term approach, with organizations ranging from Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu to startups and application companies contributing at different layers. Qwen illustrates the ecosystem strategy: by mid-2025, more than 113,000 Hugging Face models used Qwen as a base, while organizations also connected models with chips, cloud platforms, toolchains, evaluation, and deployment systems. The article places this shift on infrastructure built since 2017, including the East Data, West Compute plan, and says R1 catalyzed wider use of existing compute, energy, and data capacity. It concludes that open-source models are becoming reusable, composable components in industrial workflows and localized AI systems as China moves from DeepSeek toward AI+."
---

# The Future of the Global Open-Source AI Ecosystem: From DeepSeek to AI+

[Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face) · Adina Yakefu, Irene Solaiman · Feb 3, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

This third and final article in a series examines how Chinese AI organizations are shaping an open-source ecosystem after DeepSeek R1's January 2025 release. It argues that open sharing of models, papers, deployment infrastructure, and techniques has become the dominant near-term approach, with organizations ranging from Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu to startups and application companies contributing at different layers. Qwen illustrates the ecosystem strategy: by mid-2025, more than 113,000 Hugging Face models used Qwen as a base, while organizations also connected models with chips, cloud platforms, toolchains, evaluation, and deployment systems. The article places this shift on infrastructure built since 2017, including the East Data, West Compute plan, and says R1 catalyzed wider use of existing compute, energy, and data capacity. It concludes that open-source models are becoming reusable, composable components in industrial workflows and localized AI systems as China moves from DeepSeek toward AI+.

## Context

The article examines the formation of an organic Chinese open-source AI ecosystem after the DeepSeek R1 release, including how established companies, startups, application-focused businesses, research institutions, and the broader community are changing their roles. It also addresses the infrastructure and policy conditions supporting large-scale AI deployment and integration.

## Approach / What changed

It compares the trajectories of major Chinese AI organizations and startups, then connects their model releases to shared artifacts, cloud and hardware integration, toolchains, evaluation systems, data platforms, deployment infrastructure, and the AI+ action plan. It also uses Qwen's derivative and repository counts, alongside compute and data-center figures, to illustrate ecosystem scale and infrastructure readiness.

## Takeaways

- Qwen had more than 113,000 Hugging Face models using it as a base by mid-2025, with more than 200,000 repositories tagging Qwen.
- Research institutions and community projects such as FlagOpen, OpenDataLab, and OpenCompass focused on toolchains, evaluation, data platforms, and deployment infrastructure rather than only single-model performance.
- The article describes a shift from isolated model breakthroughs toward reusable and composable open-source components embedded in industrial workflows and localized AI systems.

**Tags:** [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [Deployment](https://yomu.fyi/topic/deployment), [LLMs](https://yomu.fyi/topic/llm), [Open Source](https://yomu.fyi/topic/open-source), [Scalability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/scalability)

- Source: [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface/one-year-since-the-deepseek-moment-blog-3)
- Source URL: https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface/one-year-since-the-deepseek-moment-blog-3
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-28T08:00:57.237Z

[Read original post](https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface/one-year-since-the-deepseek-moment-blog-3)