Raspberry Pi raised the price of its 16GB Pi 5 by $80 to $385 on November 2, 2026. The company's announcement blames limited alternative supplies of 16GB DRAM and other component shortages.
The 16GB Compute Module 5 variants also increase by $40. Raspberry Pi is holding the price of the 16GB Raspberry Pi 500+, its computer built into a mechanical keyboard.
More than three times the launch price
The 16GB Pi 5 launched on January 9, 2025, at $120. Today's $385 price is about 3.2 times that figure, a $265 difference. Those are comparisons of the company's announced dollar prices, rather than a survey of local retail listings.
Memory costs were already driving increases earlier this year. In its February 2 announcement, Raspberry Pi attributed rising LPDDR4 prices to competition for fabrication capacity from AI infrastructure. That round added $60 to 16GB products. The November explanation points more specifically to the difficulty of finding alternative 16GB DRAM supplies.
Check the workload before buying memory
Raspberry Pi's original case for the 16GB model helps explain who should reassess. Its launch post named large language models and computational fluid dynamics as uses that benefit from more memory, and said heavier desktop distributions such as Ubuntu also benefit. It acknowledged that many applications fit into 8GB or even 2GB.
For a new project, that makes measuring memory use under the intended workload a useful purchasing step. Spare capacity has a cost, and the launch examples don't establish that any particular application needs 16GB. These are purchasing implications of the documented price change, not results from a MrKeyoor hardware test.
Raspberry Pi says it wants to reverse the increases when memory costs fall, but its November notice gives no rollback date. An explicit price revision is the next signal for deployment budgets.