The AI Bubble Hits Again: Raspberry Pi Announces Up-to-$60 Price Hikes Across Its Most Popular SBCs
16GB models jump a massive $60, with other models going up $10 to $30, just two months after the last price increases.
Demand from the artificial intelligence (AI) market for storage, compute, and memory has once again led Raspberry Pi to announce price hikes across its most popular single-board computer models — this time increasing its top-end parts by a whopping $60, on top of a $25 increase announced just two months ago.
"Two months ago, we announced increases to the prices of some Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 products. These were driven by an unprecedented rise in the cost of LPDDR4 memory, thanks to competition for memory fab capacity from the AI infrastructure roll-out," Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton says of the new pricing. "Price rises have accelerated as we enter 2026, and the cost of some parts has more than doubled over the last quarter. As a result, we now need to make further increases to our own pricing, affecting all Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, and Compute Module 4 and 5, products that have 2GB or more of memory."
Those pricing changes will see all Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5, Raspberry Pi 500, Raspberry Pi 500+, Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 hardware with 2GB or more of RAM hiked by up to $60: 2GB models are going up $10, 4GB models by $15, 8GB models by $30, and range-topping 16GB models by a whopping $60. 1GB models, and the whole memory-constrained Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi Zero 2 range, remain at their old prices for now.
These new price increases are on top of those announced in December, which saw 2GB models going up $5, 4GB models $10, 8GB models $15, and 16GB models $25 — meaning the top-end Raspberry Pi 5 16GB single-board computer has gone from $120 just three months ago to $205 today.
The cause: the AI bubble, in which billions of as-yet unearned dollars are being earmarked by companies like OpenAI as promissory notes to buy memory chips that have yet to be manufactured for data centers, which have yet to be built to support demand that has yet to be proven for artificial intelligence technologies by-and-large backed by problematical large language model (LLM) technology.
It's a bubble Raspberry Pi itself is, not unironically, helping to keep inflated: the company has its own line of AI accelerator hardware, produced in partnership with Hailo and Sony, the most recent of which boasts 8GB of dedicated RAM specifically to run underwhelming LLM models — and which will almost certainly see a price hike of its own before the year is out.
"2026 looks likely to be another challenging year for memory pricing," Upton admits, "but we are working hard to limit the impact. We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again: the current situation is ultimately a temporary one, and we look forward to unwinding these price increases once it abates."
The new pricing is live from today.