Memory Pricing Leads to a $5-25 Price Hike for the Raspberry Pi 5 Single-Board Computer Family

Raspberry Pi has announced price hikes across its Raspberry Pi 5 family of single-board computers, with the top-end model seeing a $25 increase driven by supply of memory components outstripping demand — but to soften the blow is introducing a 1GB model at the entry-level $45 price point.

"At Raspberry Pi, our mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computers in the hands of people all over the world," says Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton. "For me, the crucial element of that sentence is low-cost. Over the years we've worked hard to hold down the prices of our single-board computers – at $35, a 1GB Raspberry Pi 4 costs the same as a 256MB Raspberry Pi 1 from 2012 – and to introduce new products at ever lower price points, from the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero to the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico. But today, to offset the recent unprecedented rise in the cost of LPDDR4 memory, we are announcing price increases to some Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 products."

These price hikes are the result, Upton says, of a recent near-tripling of dynamic RAM (DRAM) spot pricing — driven by insatiable demand from the artificial intelligence bubble, which is tackling criticisms over the performance of commercial large language models (LLMs) by making them bigger and more memory-hungry. Rises in spot pricing take a while to bleed through to retail pricing, but as predicted exactly that is now happening: the Raspberry Pi 5 family is seeing price hikes of $5 at the entry-level up to $25 for the range-topping 16GB variant, while the last-generation Raspberry Pi 4 range gets $5 added to the 4GB model and $10 to the 8GB model.

The move comes a couple of months after Raspberry Pi had already bumped up the price of the Raspberry Pi 5 Compute Module family, which gets another raise this month with the 16GB model going up an additional $20. "The prices of lower-density Raspberry Pi 4 variants, of Raspberry Pi 3+ and earlier models, and of Raspberry Pi Zero products," Upton notes, "remain unchanged.

"The current pressure on memory prices, driven by competition from the AI infrastructure roll-out, is painful but ultimately temporary," Upton predicts. "We remain committed to driving down the cost of computing and look forward to unwinding these price increases once it abates."