OpenAI Details Habitat Part II: 500 PB and 70M Requests/s After Python-to-Rust Rewrite With Codex

OpenAI's Oct 23 Part II walks through how it scaled Habitat — the online storage platform behind ChatGPT, Codex and everything else — to serve 1B weekly users across 40 regions, 70M requests/sec, and 500+ PB. A two-engineer Python-to-Rust rewrite in Q2 2026 using Codex and GPT-5.5 yielded 6x CPU and 15x memory efficiency gains; Azure Cosmos DB co-managed containers deliver 12x faster reads.