Raspberry Pi Raises 16GB Pi 5 Price by $80 as Memory Costs Climb
Raspberry Pi has raised the price of its 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 to $385, an $80 increase. The company also added $40 to the 16GB versions of the Compute Module 5, which now cost between $375 and $415, according to The Verge. The changes were reported on 2 November 2026. The 16GB Pi 5 originally launched at $120.
Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton attributed the increases to a lack of “alternative supply” for 16GB DRAM (dynamic RAM, the working memory chips a board uses while programs run), on top of shortages affecting other components. The company's own announcement covers the 16GB price rises. The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 received its own price increase last month.
Upton suggested that customers who do not need 16GB consider Raspberry Pi models with less memory, or older Pi models, as alternatives. He also said the company plans to roll back the price increases when memory costs fall. That is a stated intention tied to a future market condition, not a commitment with a date or a price target.
A Raspberry Pi board is a small system-on-chip (SoC) platform, meaning the processor and its supporting circuitry sit on a single piece of silicon. Each memory size is sold as its own discrete SKU, or stock-keeping unit. Buyers who pick 16GB are typically running a capacity-bound workload, one that runs out of memory before it runs out of processing power. Examples include large container stacks, local model inference, or multi-service edge nodes. Such a workload is hard to move to a lower-memory board without redesigning it, which explains why the price of that one configuration moved more visibly than the rest of the lineup.
In my view, the most useful detail for engineers is the phrase “alternative supply.” It points to a constraint specific to one memory tier, not a general board-level shortage. A low-volume buyer of a specialised SKU has little leverage over a supplier's allocation decisions, and a hobbyist or education buyer who chose the 16GB model for its headroom now faces a substantially higher entry point.
The broader context here is that Raspberry Pi built its reputation on low-cost, general-purpose computing, and memory now makes up a larger share of what that low cost depends on. The company has tied the increases to memory costs and said it will reverse them when those costs fall. Whether and when that happens depends on conditions the company does not control.
For now, anyone specifying a 16GB Pi 5 or a 16GB Compute Module 5 for a project or product line should budget for the current prices and treat the rollback as a possibility rather than a schedule.
