OpenAI
Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users
OpenAI runs ChatGPT on a single-primary Postgres with nearly 50 global read replicas. Reads are offloaded, write-heavy shardable workloads move to Cosmos DB, and PgBouncer, cache leasing and multi-layer rate limits keep the primary safe.
- Published
- 2026-01-22
- Scale
- 800 million users, millions of QPS, ~50 read replicas
- Techniques
- read replicas connection pooling caching rate limiting workload isolation query optimization
- Stack
- PostgreSQL Azure PgBouncer Kubernetes Cosmos DB