OpenAI acquires Ona to boost Codex, reaches 5M weekly users

What happened?

OpenAI has announced the acquisition of Ona, a startup specializing in cloud infrastructure, with the goal of boosting Codex, its AI-powered code generation tool. According to the official announcement on OpenAI's blog, Codex has reached 5 million weekly active users, prompting the need to scale its architecture toward persistent cloud environments. Ona, founded by former AWS and Google Cloud engineers, provides a platform that allows remote container execution with low latency and high availability, which OpenAI will integrate directly into Codex to enable asynchronous and long-running tasks.

Why is this important?

Until now, Codex ran code agents on the user's computer, limiting its capability to active sessions and local hardware. With Ona's technology, agents can operate for days in the cloud without needing the device to stay on. This enables more complex tasks, such as continuous deployments or batch processes, and facilitates collaborative work by allowing access from any device. The acquisition also strengthens OpenAI's competition against tools like Anthropic's Claude Code or GitHub Copilot. According to OpenAI's own data, Codex already generates over 10 million lines of code per week, and with Ona's infrastructure, that figure is expected to multiply thanks to the ability to run complete continuous integration and automated testing workflows without human intervention.

Consequences for the market

OpenAI's move consolidates its bet on AI-assisted software development, a market that is growing exponentially. According to a 2025 Gartner report, the market for AI coding tools is expected to reach $12 billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 35%. For developers, it means greater flexibility and productivity. For companies, it implies potential savings in local infrastructure costs, as they can outsource agent execution to OpenAI's cloud. However, it also raises questions about dependence on cloud services and data security, although OpenAI assures that organizations will maintain control over where data is stored and processed. Specifically, the announcement details that customer data will be encrypted at rest and in transit, and encryption keys will be managed by the customer through integration with AWS KMS or Azure Key Vault. This move also impacts competitors like Replit, which offers a similar cloud development environment but without the persistent AI agent layer that Codex now has.

What readers should know

• Codex can now run persistent tasks in the cloud, thanks to the acquisition of Ona.
• Users no longer need to keep their computer on or maintain an active session.
• The tool reached 5 million weekly users, indicating massive adoption.
• Security is handled with customer control over data location through customer-managed encryption.
• This move positions OpenAI ahead of competitors like Anthropic in the realm of cloud code agents.
• Full integration of Ona is expected to be ready in the second quarter of 2026, according to internal sources cited by Hipertextual.

With Ona, Codex makes the leap to the cloud, allowing developers to delegate complex tasks without hardware constraints.

Context and comparisons

Anthropic recently launched Claude Code with similar capabilities, but OpenAI responds with a strategic acquisition that accelerates its roadmap. Unlike GitHub Copilot, which integrates into the IDE, Codex now offers a persistent cloud environment, differentiating it in the market. Moreover, the purchase of Ona echoes Google's acquisition of DeepMind in 2014, which allowed Google to accelerate its AI research. In this case, Ona brings not only technology but also talent: Ona's founders, Sarah Chen and Marcus Lee, were responsible for designing the infrastructure of AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Run, respectively, ensuring robust experience in serverless environments. On the other hand, Codex adoption has already generated use cases in companies like Shopify, which reported a 40% reduction in development time for new features after implementing Codex for refactoring and unit testing tasks.

In summary, the acquisition of Ona not only strengthens OpenAI's offering but redefines the standard of what a coding assistant can do: from being a reactive tool to an autonomous agent operating in the cloud. This raises questions about the future of employment in software development, though for now the demand for developers continues to grow, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which projects a 25% growth in developer positions by 2031.