Rapidly Scaling Online Storage to Serve Over 1 Billion ChatGPT Users
OpenAI, Friday, September 11th, 2026
How OpenAI grew Habitat from a Python library into a distributed platform serving 22M requests per second.
OpenAI describes the evolution of Habitat from an internal Python library into a globally distributed storage platform now serving one billion ChatGPT users at 22 million requests per second.
The post covers the architectural decisions made as load grew, including how the team handled sharding, replication and the transition away from an abstraction that was never designed for this scale.
It is a detailed engineering account rather than a product announcement, and the failure modes described will be familiar to anyone who has outgrown a storage layer. This is part one of a planned series.