Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users
OpenAI's Habitat online storage platform now handles over 70 million requests per second and 500 PB of data for 1 billion users.
OpenAI details the evolution of Habitat, its online storage platform backing ChatGPT and other products, which began in mid-2024 as a Python client-side library over Azure Cosmos DB. Habitat now processes more than 70 million requests per second, serves over 500 petabytes of data across nearly 40 geographic regions, and supports over 1 billion users weekly. By mid-2025 the client library approach became brittle, so OpenAI moved Habitat into a standalone service to centralize deployments, observability, and multi-tenancy reliability. This is part one of a two-part series; a future post will cover read optimization and scaling the Azure Cosmos DB partnership.
- Habitat scales 10x+ year-over-year for three years to 70M+ requests per second
- Platform stores 500+ PB of data across almost 40 geographic regions
- Started as a Python library over Azure Cosmos DB, later rebuilt as a standalone service
- Centralized service reduced brittle cross-team client rollout coordination
From the original article
14 min read at openai.com
Learn how OpenAI evolved Habitat from a Python library into a globally distributed storage platform serving 1 billion ChatGPT users and 22M requests per second.
openai.com
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