✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users | OpenAI

openai.com · 2,503 words · saved by 6 readers

For years, PostgreSQL has been one of the most critical, under-the-hood data systems powering core products like ChatGPT and OpenAI’s API. As our user base grows rapidly, the demands on our databases have increased exponentially, too. Over the past year, our PostgreSQL load has grown by more than 10x, and it continues to rise quickly. Our efforts to advance our production infrastructure to sustain this growth revealed a new insight: PostgreSQL can be scaled to reliably support much larger read-heavy workloads than many previously thought possible. The system (initially created by a team of scientists at University of California, Berkeley) has enabled us to support massive global traffic with a single primary Azure PostgreSQL flexible server instance⁠ (opens in a new window) and nearly 50 read replicas spread over multiple regions globally. This is the story of how we’ve scaled PostgreSQL at OpenAI to support millions of queries per second for 800 million users through rigorous optimiz

January 22, 2026 Engineering Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users By Bohan Zhang, Member of the Technical Staff Loading… For years, PostgreSQL has been one of the most critical, under-the-hood data systems powering core products like ChatGPT and OpenAI’s API. As our user base grows rapidly, the demands on our databases have increased exponentially, too. Over the past year, our PostgreSQL load has grown by more than 10x, and it continues to rise quickly. Our efforts to advance our production infrastructure to sustain this growth revealed a new insight: PostgreSQL can be scaled

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading