Xi Jinping pledges 5,000 AI training slots as China's Qwen dominates open-source downloads

At the July 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai, China made a strategic push to lead the Global South's AI adoption. Xi Jinping pledged 5,000 AI training and seminar slots for developing nations over five years, alongside cooperation centers tied to ASEAN, the African Union, and BRICS. Representatives of 29 countries signed the agreement to form the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), headquartered in Shanghai. This capacity-building initiative sits alongside China's open-source model releases, with Alibaba offering free training and tokens for Qwen, and DeepSeek and Moonshot's Kimi providing affordable fine-tuning options.

The adoption numbers are striking: Alibaba's Qwen surpassed 1 billion cumulative Hugging Face downloads by January 21, 2026, and by March it accounted for over half of global open-source model downloads—a dramatic shift from four years ago when US models held roughly 60% of that share. Evidence of this shift is seen in concrete deals: Singapore's AI Singapore program chose Qwen over Meta's Llama; Malaysia's sovereign AI ecosystem runs on DeepSeek; Uganda’s Sunflower LLM covering 31 languages was built on Qwen 3; and Zhipu AI is selling into governments and state-owned enterprises across Malaysia, Singapore, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya. While questions remain about enforcement of WAICO's agreements and the true mix of commercial preference versus subsidy, the direction is clear: Chinese models are winning the developer habit layer in the Global South.