Google has selected NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 as the heart of a couple of its recent devices, the Nexus 9 and Project Tango tablets, and apparently now a third piece of Google kit will be powered by NVIDIA’s chip.

Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group recently gave us an update on Project Ara, the modular smartphone that it’s been working on for more than a year now. Google says that it’s been working with its Spiral 2 prototype Ara units and that it had two processor modules successfully connect to the display module. Those processor modules feature Marvell PXA1928 and NVIDIA Tegra K1 chips.

Google went on to say that we’ll see both processors included in the reference designs for its upcoming Module Developers Kit (MDK) v0.20 release.

Project Ara sounds like it’s coming along nicely, and it’s exciting to hear that NVIDIA’s high-end Tegra K1 processor is playing nicely with the Ara prototypes that Google’s got kicking around its labs. We’ll have to wait and see if the Tegra K1 is a module option for consumers when Ara goes public in 2015, but if the chip is working well in Google’s testing, there’s certainly a chance that we’ll be able to use it with Ara as well.