(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton/PCMag)
Yikes. The memory shortage is so bad that Raspberry Pi is raising prices for the second time in two months by as much as $60.
The price hikes affect the company’s generally low-cost computers, which can be used in custom projects. Raspberry Pi Founder Eben Upton blames the decision on rising memory costs that have continued into 2026, causing the price of some parts to more than double "over the last quarter," he wrote in a Monday blog post.
"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,” he says.
The news is particularly bad for the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 board. It originally cost $120, but went up to $145 in December. It's now facing a $60 price hike, bringing it to $205. In addition, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB is now $115, up from $85.
(Credit: PCMag/Raspberry Pi)Another casualty is the Raspberry Pi 500, the mini PC packed inside a keyboard. It's now $130, a $30 increase, although the higher pricing may not have rolled out at all retailers. Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi 500+ can also now retail for $260, up from $200.
In some good news, Upton says, "We don’t anticipate any changes to the price of Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 3, and other older products, as we currently hold several years’ inventory of the LPDDR2 memory that they use."
Still, Raspberry Pi's announcement is an ominous sign, given that the last price hike was only two months ago. PCPartPicker indicates that memory component pricing has continued to increase since then. The shortage, driven by AI data center demand, is expected to affect all consumer electronics, raising prices and limiting memory configurations. Both suppliers and analysts expect the crunch to persist through 2028, making it hard for buyers to avoid.