Rapidly Scaling Online Storage to Serve Over 1 Billion ChatGPT Users (Part II)
OpenAI, Friday, October 23rd, 2026
OpenAI explains how it scaled Azure Cosmos DB beneath Habitat, the storage platform behind its products.
OpenAI describes the second part of its work on Habitat, the storage platform that serves more than 1 billion users across 40 regions and over 500 petabytes of data.
This installment focuses on scaling the underlying Azure Cosmos DB layer.
OpenAI says close work with the Azure team led to a multi-tenancy approach built on co-managed containers.
The post walks through the tradeoffs the team made to become reliable first, then fast, then operable at massive scale.