Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users

Habitat is OpenAI's online storage platform that handles data access for ChatGPT and other products, processing over 70 million requests per second for more than 1 billion weekly users across 40 geographic regions. Originally built as a simple Python library two years ago, it evolved into a distributed system managing 500+ petabytes of data because OpenAI's user growth exceeded 10x year-over-year for three consecutive years. The platform abstracts away database management complexities so product engineers can store and retrieve data without mastering underlying infrastructure like schema lookup, authorization, or connection pooling (the management of reusable database connections).