Raspberry Pi Hikes Prices By Up to $150 as the AI Bubble Hits Hard, Confirms Raspberry Pi 6 Plans

Raspberry Pi has more unwelcome news for its fans: yet another price hike, driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble and its insatiable demand for memory — though the impact is being cushioned by the introduction of a new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 3GB variant.

"As many of you are aware, the price of memory continues to rise, with a seven-fold increase over the last year in the price of the LPDDR4 DRAM used on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5," Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton admits, by way of background to the company's latest price increases. "Providing low-cost general-purpose computing remains a non-negotiable priority for us at Raspberry Pi, so while we can’t avoid passing on a portion of these increased costs, we’re also doing engineering work to expand the range of memory-density options available to our customers: we want to make sure you don’t pay for more memory than you need."

With that said, though, those looking to buy a Raspberry Pi single-board computer from today will indeed be paying more for memory than yesterday — and considerably more than a year ago. The Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 4GB variants are going up $25, the 8GB variants $50, while the range-topping Raspberry Pi 5 16GB model will cost $100 more today than yesterday. The Raspberry Pi 500, both on its own and as the desktop bundle, is going up $50, while the Raspberry Pi 500+ is being bumped an eye-watering $150.

It's not just the consumer-centric single-board computer models that are affected, either: the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and 4S 1GB goes up $11.25 today, Compute Module 4, 4S, and 5 2GB by $12.50, the 4GB by $25, the 8GB by $50, and the Compute Module 5 16GB by $100. The Raspberry Pi Development Kit for Compute Module 5 goes up by $25, and the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 — which we predicted would not be available for very long at its launch price thanks to 8GB of on-board memory — now costs $50 more than yesterday, taking an already very shaky value proposition outright and shattering it.

The reason: the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble, led by companies buying up as much memory and storage as possible to train and deploy large language models (LLMs). It's not the first time Raspberry Pi has been affected: back in December last year the company announced a $5-25 price hike as memory component supplies began to increase in price, followed by another $10-30 in February this year. Both pale into insignificance compared to the latest hikes, which has seen the top-end Raspberry Pi 5 16GB go from $120 in November last year to $305 today.

Those on a budget can take some small solace at the fact that lower-RAM models are being held at their current prices: the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 1GB and 2GB variants are available from $35 to $65 still, and no price increases are expected for the Raspberry Pi Zero or Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and older thanks to their use of older LPDDR2 memory. Upton has also announced a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 3GB, sitting between the existing 2GB and 4GB models at $83.75.

"We’ve said a number of times now that memory prices won't remain at their current very high level indefinitely; the circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate," Upton predicts. "When they do, we will reverse our price increases, and until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can."

The company has also confirmed, in its latest earnings report, that despite struggles to keep its products affordable it's forging ahead with work on the next-generation Raspberry Pi 6 — but until and unless the AI bubble bursts and component pricing returns to normal, it's not likely we'll see the device on-shelves any time soon.

The new pricing is live at Raspberry Pi resellers from today.