Gregory's Server@mcc Assuming x86_64, they can be repurposed as pretty much linux-centric general purpose computers with builds of coreboot+EDKII
The hardware itself is not locked to ChromeOS. You are given more agency about what to do with the hardware than with most hardware out there.
It would be interesting to see more education for recycling these in some useful form, rather than sent to ewaste. Equally so if Google themselves were to be part of the system to do so.
After all, organizations using ChromeOS wants the support. Google will still sell just as many, and now still useful computers are available for better purposes.
Technically, the same applies for AArch64 hardware, but there is no real community-made alternative platform firmware out there. You’re still given agency over the device with “depthcharge”, what ships on all ChromeHardware. So you can actually run standard Linux distros on those too, and given the ChromeOS team always, yes always, upstreams their work, support is better than any other similar ARM hardware out there.