Google Chrome is available as an Apple M1 native app today

“Google presents Chrome for download as either an x86_64 package or an M1 native option—which comes across as a little odd, since the M1 native version is actually a universal binary, which works on either M1 or traditional Intel Macs. Presumably, Google is pushing separate downloads due to the much smaller file size necessary for the x86_64-only package—the universal binary contains both x86_64 and ARM applications, and weighs in at 165MiB to the Intel-only package's 96MiB.”

It is not clear what is being saved here.

Apps can determine whether or not they are running on an M1, so it should be possible for Google’s update code to download only the stripped version for the actual architecture.

I hope this is just a temporary situation.