Scaling Storage for 1 Billion ChatGPT Users (Part I)
Published "Scaling Storage for 1 Billion ChatGPT Users (Part I)" — chronicles the evolution of Habitat, a storage platform handling more than 1 billion weekly users, 70 million requests per second and 500 petabytes. It went from a single DB client library at DevDay 2023 to a standalone service in mid-2025; metastable failures caused by LIFO connection pooling were broken by switching to FIFO reuse; and in Q2 2026, 2 engineers rewrote the whole thing in Rust with Codex and GPT-5.5, gaining 6 times the CPU efficiency and 15 times the memory efficiency of Python. Storage runs on Azure Cosmos DB, and analytics on Rockset via CDC streaming.
Why it matters
Leaves a first-hand record that the bottleneck of AI products has moved from models to stateful infrastructure, and is a case of a coding agent actually being put to work rewriting the company's core infrastructure.
Source — Primary sources first; secondary reports are labelled “Press”
Officialopenai.comhttps://openai.com/index/scaling-storage-one-billion-users-part-one/Added in Week 38, 2026 · See that week