GitHub says massive influx of AI-generated code required extra 4 million CPU cores and 160 petabytes of storage to manage — a sixfold increase to 7.4 billion monthly commits in one year
Agentic AI led to a sixfold year-on-year influx of new code at GitHub, leading the company to add 4 million CPU cores and 160PB of storage to its datacenters
GitHub, the world's largest code repository, has reported a significant surge in AI-generated code, necessitating the addition of 4 million CPU cores, 160 petabytes of storage, and 50 terabits per second of networking capacity to manage the influx. The company's technical report reveals that code commits, measuring the addition or removal of code, have increased sixfold, while merged pull requests, finalizing features or bug fixes, have quadrupled.
This growth pattern has been exponential, with a half-yearly increase from 1.4 billion commits per month in April to 2.9 billion in August, and a current count of 7.4 billion for September. In just one year, GitHub processed 17.9 billion code pushes, surpassing the total for both 2024 and 2025 combined. AI agents are primarily responsible for this increase, with 40% of pull requests now initiated by an agent, up from 17% in March 2026.
Repositories initiated by AI experience eight times more activity than those created manually. This surge in code activity has put significant strain on GitHub's hardware requirements, necessitating the reengineering of its backend to decouple storage from compute as much as possible.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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