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11 Sep 2026

OpenAI details Habitat storage platform behind 1B+ weekly ChatGPT users

11 Sep 2026: OpenAI published how Habitat — its online storage platform — serves 70M+ requests per second and 500PB+ for products used by over 1 billion people each week. Those figures are OpenAI’s.

11 Sep 2026: OpenAI published “Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users” (Part I) by Jon Lee, Chaomin Yu, and Ben Ries — Members of Technical Staff.

OpenAI: Habitat handles more than 70 million requests every second, stores more than 500 petabytes, spans almost 40 geographic regions, and supports products used by over 1 billion people each week.

Habitat began as a Python client-side library on Azure Cosmos DB for GPTs at DevDay 2023. OpenAI says mid-2025 it became a standalone Python service to cut cross-team rollout friction, then in Q2 2026 two engineers used Codex and GPT-5.5 to rewrite it in Rust.

OpenAI: the Rust service now handles about 95% of production requests and is roughly 6× more CPU-efficient and 15× more memory-efficient than the Python version, with lower average and tail latencies.

The API is a constrained NoSQL design (TAO-inspired objects and edges). Complex queries go to a Rockset secondary view via change-data-capture — OpenAI’s stated tradeoff to keep online request cost predictable.

A primary OpenAI engineering page putting Habitat scale numbers and a Rust migration claim on openai.com. File the page. Treat every metric as OpenAI’s until independently measured.

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