diff --git a/data/openwebtext/prepare.py b/data/openwebtext/prepare.py
index aad8170..eebfe53 100644
--- a/data/openwebtext/prepare.py
+++ b/data/openwebtext/prepare.py
@@ -11,8 +11,13 @@ from datasets import load_dataset # huggingface datasets
 # good number to use is ~order number of cpu cores // 2
 num_proc = 8
 
+# number of workers in load_dataset() call
+# best number might be different from num_proc above as it also depends on NW speed.
+# it is better than 1 usually though
+num_proc_load_dataset = num_proc
+
 # takes 54GB in huggingface .cache dir, about 8M documents (8,013,769)
-dataset = load_dataset("openwebtext")
+dataset = load_dataset("openwebtext", num_proc=num_proc_load_dataset)
 
 # owt by default only contains the 'train' split, so create a test split
 split_dataset = dataset["train"].train_test_split(test_size=0.0005, seed=2357, shuffle=True)