You’ve probably seen the headlines around the DRAM market. Here’s the one-sentence version: DDR4 production capacity has been shifted toward more profitable High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is in massive demand thanks to the AI boom - and that shift has triggered a severe global DDR4 shortage.

The result? On average, DDR4 prices have jumped ~300% over the past six months, and unfortunately, there’s no clear relief in sight.

Because of this, effective February 2, Raspberry Pi prices are increasing across most Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 board variants, as well as Compute Modules.

What stays the same

For now, Raspberry Pi 5 (1GB) and Raspberry Pi 4 (1GB) pricing remains unchanged. We’ll continue offering them at $35 and $45, respectively.

What’s changing

The impact varies by model. The more RAM on the board, the more noticeable the change, reflecting how severely higher-density memory has been affected by current market conditions.

The 2GB versions have still seen only a relatively modest increase.

To help offset this, we’re offering a temporary 10% discount on our Budget and Starter Kits.

These kits include just the essentials needed to get up and running: SD cards, power supplies, HDMI cables, etc. Since all of these components have also been impacted by rising costs, this promotion is limited and will run until February 10 or until allocated stock runs out, whichever comes first.

Is 1GB or 2GB enough?

While 1GB or 2GB of RAM may sound conservative, we continue to see countless successful personal and commercial projects built on boards with this memory footprint, including:

• Digital signage
• Home automation
• Pi-hole (ad blocking)
• Media servers
• VPN servers
• OctoPrint servers

 …and many more.

Small boards still do big things - even in the middle of an AI arms race.

Stay cool and keep on Pi-ing!