ChipsSeptember 11, 2026via OpenAI Blog
Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users
Why it matters
Infrastructure deep-dive: OpenAI is publishing its storage architecture for serving ChatGPT at scale—a rare window into the compute and backend buildout required to run the world's largest AI application.
Key signals
- Habitat platform serves 1 billion ChatGPT users
- 22M requests per second throughput
- Evolved from Python library to globally distributed system
- OpenAI engineering blog (part one of series)
- Published September 2026
- Habitat evolved from Python library to globally distributed storage platform
- Serves 1 billion ChatGPT users
- Handles 22M requests per second
- Published as engineering deep-dive (part one of series)
- Infrastructure/systems story, not model or product feature
The hook
22M requests per second. Here's how OpenAI's Habitat storage platform evolved to serve a billion ChatGPT users without melting.
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.