Scaling Storage for One Billion ChatGPT Users: The Evolution of OpenAI's Habitat
First seen · 9/11/2026, 06:00 PMLatest activity · 9/11/2026, 06:00 PM
OpenAI provides a technical breakdown of Habitat, an internal storage system that transitioned from a simple Python library into a globally distributed storage platform. Designed to sustain ChatGPT's surge past one billion users, the architecture now handles 22 million requests per second. This first engineering retrospective unpacks the distributed systems decisions required to keep a planetary-scale generative AI responsive under extreme read-write pressure.
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