Speculation about AI application: Rapid price increase of Raspberry Pi

Rally in the share price of British computer hardware manufacturer Raspberry Pi. The shares of the developer of single-board computers rose by up to 42 percent on Tuesday on the London Stock Exchange, marking a record increase since the beginning of the week.

According to the news agency Reuters, the upswing was fueled by speculation on social media that demand for Raspberry Pi devices could increase as they can be used to control the popular AI chatbot OpenClaw. According to the report, programmers have adapted OpenClaw to run efficiently on a small cluster of Raspberry Pi minicomputers.

AI assistant on cost-effective hardware

Reuters refers to the X user @aleabitoreddit (Serenity), a self-proclaimed "analyst for materials and semi/AI/Fintech" with more than 58,000 followers. On Monday, this user claimed in a post that buyers had recently started hoarding Raspberry Pi devices because they are much cheaper than Apple products costing over 500 US dollars. "They also have their own mini-NVDA-CUDA-Light utility ecosystem that people are using," Serenity wrote. It turns out that these extremely inexpensive devices for 20 or 200 US dollars are perfect for the mass deployment of isolated instances.

Previously, people only bought one or two devices for hobby or educational purposes, "(b)ut now, startups and individuals from Silicon Valley are anecdotally buying dozens or hundreds of these devices to simultaneously run OpenClaw agent swarms or do things like agent-based marketing on Reddit and other platforms."

Damindu Jayaweera, an analyst at the British investment bank Peel Hunt, told the British daily newspaper The Telegraph that tech enthusiasts are interested in the idea of running a "radically lightweight" AI assistant on "very cost-effective hardware." "Instead of needing a modern computer, it can be run on devices like older Raspberry Pi boards with a fraction of the memory and power."

CEO buys shares in his own company

Previously, there were also reports that the CEO of Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton, had bought nearly 5,000 shares of the struggling company. This halted the months-long stock slide. A company spokesperson told the online portal Sharecast that, in their opinion, this "may be contributing to the sentiment." However, the stock price is still about 50 percent below its record high from a year ago. Since last summer, the stock has been declining due to falling profits and a sharp increase in the cost of memory chips used in many of its products.

Raspberry Pi primarily manufactures powerful, cost-effective single-board computers. Earlier this year, the British company stated that its core profits for 2025 would exceed expectations, but warned that the outlook for 2026 was clouded by uncertainty in the supply and pricing of memory chips.

(akn)