Raspberry Pi prices hiked as AI gobbles all the memory

Raspberry Pi is upping the cost of some devices by double-digit percentages from today driven by what CEO Eben Upton calls "insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI applications."

Even though the company entered the year with substantial stockpiles of memory, Upton said the time had come "to pass some of this cost on."

"At this point, memory costs roughly 120 percent more than it did a year ago," Upton said today, which makes the company's stockpiling look like a canny move.

The 4 GB Compute Module 4 and Compute Module 5 have gone up by $5 or 11 percent to $50, and the 8 GB variants have risen 12 percent to $95. Raspberry Pi 500 customers can now expect to pay $100 rather than $90, and the Raspberry Pi Development Kit for Compute Module 5 has risen $5 to $135.

As far as the Compute Module 4 is concerned, the move is a reversal of the price reduction made in May.

According to Upton, "1 GB and 2 GB products are not affected, as the impact of the memory price increases is not so pronounced at these densities."

During an earnings call in September, Raspberry Pi CFO Richard Boult said the company's margins were larger on the higher-density memory variants. Upton noted it had sufficient supplies of the lower-density memory chips to get through the rest of 2025 and into 2026.

Of the increases, the CEO said: "We look forward to reversing them once memory prices return to their long-term downward trajectory." He did not give an indication of when that might happen.

• Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4 update fixes old bugs and dares you to break it again
• PC memory costs to climb as fabs chase filthy lucre in servers and HBM
• DRAM spot prices doubled last week
• AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

Memory makers are already prioritizing production of higher margin HBM, and analysts predicted last year it would have implications for DRAM.

At the end of September, memory-maker Micron said it had nearly sold out of the HBM it will produce in 2026, and the company's chief business officer noted "extreme shortages at customers."

Raspberry Pi is also increasing the cost of the Raspberry Pi 3B+ by $5 to $40 and dropping the price of the Compute Module 1 by $5 to $25, although neither change is directly related to memory prices.

The Compute Module 1 made its debut more than a decade ago, and Raspberry Pi has pledged to keep that production line rolling "until at least January 2026." It does not, however, recommend that customers use it for new embedded applications.

While the price hikes are unfortunate, they reflect the reality of the memory market and the surging demand that might be a boon for memory-makers such as Micron, but also a pain for customers buying Raspberry Pi's now not-quite-so-cheap computers. ®