OpenAI's Habitat clears 70M requests a second

OpenAI says its Habitat storage service handles more than 70 million requests per second, serves products used by more than 1 billion people weekly, and stores over 500 petabytes across nearly 40 regions, according to its engineering account of Habitat’s scale. In Q2 2026, two engineers rewrote it in Rust; OpenAI says Rust now handles 95% of production requests with 6× CPU efficiency and 15× memory efficiency versus Python. This is a scale-specific migration result, not a universal reason to rewrite a service, but builders can file it beside OpenAI’s safety-monitoring compute tax when budgeting reliability and performance work.