OpenAI is buying a code-storage start-up to take on Microsoft’s GitHub

OpenAI is buying Pierre Computer, a small developer tools company whose Git storage system already runs inside Codex, the company told Axios on Wednesday. OpenAI plans to build Pierre’s Code Storage straight into Codex, its AI coding agent, in a move Axios frames as a challenge to Microsoft’s GitHub.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed, and Pierre’s open-source projects will stay open source. Neither company had posted about the deal on its own website by Wednesday afternoon (UTC): Pierre’s site still lists Code Storage as its product and is advertising engineering jobs.

What Pierre’s Code Storage does

Code Storage is Git hosting built for machines rather than people. Pierre launched it in October 2025 as a “white-label, ultra low-latency git infrastructure layer” that other companies plug into their own apps, so their AI agents can create repositories and push code on demand, without the rate limits and sign-in hoops of a service built for human developers.

Pierre says AI companies including Lovable, Bolt, Amp and Poke use it to store generated code, agent memory files, design files and even legal documents. Its product page claims no caps on storage, repositories or requests, repositories of up to 32TB, and syncing with GitHub and other hosts. These figures come from Pierre and haven’t been independently checked.

Pierre’s launch post also made a pointed pitch to companies that rely on GitHub. Among the problems it said it kept hearing was “an overwhelming fear of Microsoft shutting off API access, particularly after re-orging into Microsoft’s AI org.” The company also makes open-source tools for showing code changes, called Diffs, Trees and DiffsHub.

A shot at GitHub

GitHub has been the default home for the world’s code for well over a decade, but Axios notes it has had a run of outages as AI coding took off, and critics argue it was built for people rather than AI agents. Microsoft owns GitHub and a large stake in OpenAI, though the two increasingly compete.

OpenAI isn’t the only one circling. According to Axios, Cursor, now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a growing part of SpaceX’s AI revenue, launched a GitHub rival called Origin in August, and former GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke launched a competing platform for AI coding agents last month.

OpenAI already rebuilt Git for itself

The deal comes days after OpenAI described Pando, a new backend for Git that now runs all development in its own monorepo. OpenAI says the extra work generated with Codex left its old system struggling, with slow fetches, failed merges and reliability at times below 90%. Pando cut median push latency nearly fivefold and now serves nearly a petabyte of Git data a day, the company says.

OpenAI ended that post by saying it is “exploring ways to share the technology that makes Pando possible with our users.” Buying a company that already sells Git storage to AI firms is one way to get there faster.

OpenAI’s third Codex deal this year

Pierre is the latest in a string of purchases built around Codex. In March, OpenAI agreed to buy Astral, maker of the popular Python tools uv, Ruff and ty, saying Codex had more than 2 million weekly active users. In June it agreed to buy Ona, formerly Gitpod, whose cloud environments let Codex agents keep working after a laptop is closed; by then OpenAI said more than 5 million people used Codex each week.

Taken together, OpenAI now owns tools for writing code, checking it, running it in the cloud and, once this deal closes, storing it. Codex is also becoming more central to ChatGPT itself: from December, ChatGPT and Codex will share one usage limit on paid plans.

Why it matters

As AI agents write more of the world’s software, whoever stores that code sits at the centre of how it gets built. By buying Pierre, OpenAI is moving from helping developers write code to owning more of the place it lives, territory GitHub has held almost unchallenged.

Sources: Axios, Pierre Computer Company, “Introducing Code Storage”, Code Storage, OpenAI, “Scaling Git at OpenAI”, OpenAI, “OpenAI to acquire Astral”, OpenAI, “OpenAI to acquire Ona”, GeekWire.