Raspberry pi hikes prices again as ai devours global ram supply
The RAM crisis just punched the maker community in the gut. Raspberry Pi, the non-profit that once sold $35 computers, has raised prices for the third time in weeks, with its flagship 16 GB Raspberry Pi 5 jumping $100 overnight.
That is not a typo. A board that cost $269 yesterday now lists at $369 in Spain. The Pi 500+ keyboard computer leapt $150. Even the humble 4 GB variants are up $25 across the board. CEO Eben Upton blamed a seven-fold spike in the price of LPDDR4 memory since last spring, a direct ripple from data-center GPUs hoovering every wafer they can find.
The math is brutal
Raspberry Pi keeps margins razor-thin—its charter is education, not profit—so when DRAM quotes exploded the foundation had two choices: stop shipping or pass the pain. It chose the latter, adding a 3 GB Pi 4 to the stack so buyers can pay only for the RAM they truly need. The irony of announcing the move on April Fools’ Day was not lost on engineers who woke up to real sticker shock.
Compare the numbers: a 16 GB Pi 5 now costs more than a used Intel NUC with a Core i5 and NVMe storage. For emulation, multimedia or light coding, the x86 box is faster, quieter and ships today. The Pi’s edge—price-per-pin—has evaporated.
Why this won’t rebound quickly
Memory makers have shifted capacity to high-margin HBM3 and GDDR6 stacks that feed AI accelerators. Consumer DDR4 is an afterthought. Spot markets show no relief before 2026, and even Upton admits the foundation cannot subsidize hardware forever. His pledge to roll back increases “when conditions ease” is the first such promise in the industry, but history shows manufacturers rarely reverse hikes once the market swallows them.
The takeaway: the era of impulse-buy Raspberry Pi clusters is over. Hobbyists now weigh every gigabyte the way commercial OEMs do. And if you already own a 4 GB board, eBay suddenly looks like a premium storefront.