Google Tipped to Have Cancelled Nvidia Chromebook Plans

Google has reportedly scrapped its plans to introduce Chromebooks with integrated Nvidia graphics cards. The company incorporated gaming laptop-like features such as changeable RGB keyboards and high refresh rate displays into some of their models last year. But all of these devices come equipped with integrated GPUs and therefore were intended for use with streaming services such as Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming. Since then, reports suggested that the Mountain-View-based tech giant was exploring the idea of launching Chromebooks with dedicated GPU.

Earlier this year, a Chromebook board with the codename Hades was spotted by 9to5Google with a dedicated GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, similar to the one used in some Windows gaming laptops. This chip could have been used as a basis for multiple PC manufacturers to build Chromebooks on.

Now, according to developer comments spotted first by About Chromebooks on Chromium Gerrit, the Hades board, alongside two other Nvidia-equipped boards, Agah and Herobrine, were cancelled, which indicates that any laptops based on those boards will not be produced.

It is speculated that Google may release Chromebooks with dedicated GPUs in the future. A recent code patch revealed the existence of a board codenamed Aurora. This board is thought to be for internal Steam testing and not an actual device, but it is marked with an RTX 3050 graphics card. As a result, work to make Steam on ChromeOS compatible with dedicated GPUs may still be ongoing.

Google has also notably reported to have cancelled the development of Chromebooks powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 SoC, a project with the codename Herobrine, in addition to ditching the Nvidia-based Chromebook plans. This suggests that no new ChromeOS tablets will be released in the foreseeable future.