tpu

This is really Tensorflow as a service. You get an IP address and a port you send gRPC requests to: https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/blob/master/tools/diagnost... Presumably, there's a whole server behind that address that has all the right drivers and libraries: details you don't need to care about. The only partial lock-in is that not all ops are supported and you need to figure if there are any parts of the graph in the critical part that will run on the CPU instead. There's a tool for that: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/cloud-tpu-tools#tpu_compat... Competitors could launch something similar that uses GPUs tomorrow. Now, if you don't already use TF and don't want to switch, that's another story.