Hot off the back of price rises it announced in October, the Raspberry Pi Foundation today said the cost of its Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computers is going up again.
From November 2026, the Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB RAM rises by $80, now priced at $385 from approved resellers. The model launched at $120 back in 2025, rose to $205 in early 2026, and later incremental increases got it to $305.
And it’s not the only model whose price tag will be making wallets wince.
A $40 price hike hits the Raspberry Pi 5 Compute Module (CM5) with 16 GB RAM.
For now at least, the (not exactly cheap) Raspberry Pi 500+ keyboard PC is unchanged.
The rises are, of course, not ones the foundation makes willing. It’s down to the ongoing memory crisis caused by colossal demand from the AI industry and data centre hyperscalers, exacerbated by a lack of diversified supply chain.
It says it looks forward to “rolling back our price increases when memory costs fall once again”. When will that be? Some industry bods say not until the mid-2030s.
Raspberry Pi is putting forward to creative solutions to try and help. It launched a 3GB model of its Raspberry Pi 4 and, earlier in the crisis, a dual-RAM model using lower-density chips. It also suggests would-be buyers consider how much RAM they actually need.
But it is the case that smaller hardware companies are hit worse by industry volatility, mainly because of (a lack of) purchasing power.
This year saw Pine64 nope out of making Linux devices at all due to the compounding factors from component cost rises, which had inflated to the point it rendered their whole ‘affordable’ hardware pitch to encourage hacking and tinkering utterly moot.
You’re to blame, buddy
OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently blamed memory supply chain issues on selfish users buying up RAM to run open-source AI models locally, saying it’s “quite terrible”1 for people to have “a bunch of the world’s limited supply of [DRAM] sitting in their own computer”.
So, if you’re sat there, tutting at the latest round of price rises, have some self awareness.
Are you sat next to a monster gaming rig or a tricked-out workstation? If so, I hope you do the altruistic thing and tear those RAM sticks and post them to your nearest data centre.
They need it more than you, sucker.
- What will be ‘terrible’ to do in 2027? Use the world’s constrained supply of electricity and gas to heat our own homes And in 2028? Expecting water to quench our thirst rather than cool the data centre next door? And in 2029? The depravity to think for oneself, I imagine. ↩︎