GitHub now gets 7.4 billion code saves a month, mostly from AI

GitHub, the site where many software teams store and manage their code, now sees 7.4 billion commits a month. A commit is a saved change to code. The company shared the number at its GitHub Universe conference on Wednesday and says most of the growth comes from AI agents, which are programs that write and save code on their own.

The jump in numbers

The pace is striking. Developers pushed 65 million monthly commits in 2024. In April the figure was 1.4 billion, and in August it was 2.9 billion. To cope, GitHub says it has added 4 million CPU cores (the processing power behind its servers) and 160 petabytes of storage this year. It also added 50 Tb/s of network capacity and more computing power for GitHub Actions.

Why it matters

The company's outages have become a recurring theme, and it blames the rapid growth in what it calls agentic demand. Adding hardware is not enough, according to Jay Parikh, a Microsoft executive. GitHub is also rebuilding its platform so computing and storage are handled separately. Its internal tests show up to 35x higher write throughput with the new design.

Anyone whose business or software vendors depend on GitHub should know the service is under heavy strain. What is not yet known is when the rebuild will be finished or whether outages will become less frequent.