2021 AMC 10A Problem 25

Choose the center color in $3$ ways. Its other two chips cannot occupy any edge-middle square, because those squares are adjacent to the center. Thus they must occupy two of the four corners, which can be chosen in $\binom42=6$ ways. For either possible corner pattern—two opposite corners or two corners on the same side—the adjacency conditions force the remaining two colors up to interchanging them. Hence there are $2$ completions for each choice of the center color and its two corners. The total is $$3\binom42\cdot2=36.$$ Thus, E is the correct answer.