OpenAI's Habitat storage platform Rust rewrite

OpenAI published a technical deep-dive on Habitat, its internal online storage platform, describing a system that now handles 70 million requests per second across 500 petabytes of data. Habitat began as a Python client-side library in mid-2024 and grew into a distributed service powering ChatGPT and Codex. In Q2 2026, two engineers rewrote the entire service in Rust using Codex and GPT-5.5, achieving 6x CPU efficiency and 15x memory efficiency over the Python version; the Rust service now handles 95% of production traffic. OpenAI said the platform has grown more than 10x year-over-year for three consecutive years, and the Python version previously handled over 20 million requests per second at peak before the rewrite.