Alibaba Group (HKG:9988) cloud unit's Qwen AI models are seeing growing use in Japan, with startups like Abeja building top-ranking systems on the open-source framework, Nikkei reported Tuesday.

Abeja's QwQ-32B, based on Qwen, ranks among the best for complex reasoning, according to the report.

Qwen2.5-Max placed sixth in a major Japanese-language benchmark, outperforming models from DeepSeek and Google. Abeja's Qwen-tuned model was the highest-ranked Japanese entry, the report said.

Other startups, including Elyza and Lightblue, are also developing Qwen-based models. Analysts cite Qwen's strong Japanese accuracy and data efficiency, according to the report.

Alibaba aims to deploy Qwen on local servers to ease data concerns and expand to over 1,000 Japanese users within three years. Its newest model, Qwen3, supports 119 languages and was trained on 36 trillion tokens, the report said.

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