Raspberry Pi stock has jumped 50% in the past week

Raspberry Pi, the shaper of basic, inexpensive computers, is successful the midst of a retail capitalist banal frenzy that brings the glory days of GameStop to mind. Over the past week, shares successful the company, which trades connected the London Stock Exchange, person accrued astir 50%.

The spike came arsenic a astonishment to beauteous overmuch everyone, including CEO Eben Upton, who was connected abrogation erstwhile the crisp emergence began.

“It does look similar radical are picking america for these applications,” Upton told Bloomberg. “I don’t cognize if ‘meme stock’ is simply a slur oregon not. There is evidently a retail constituent to our shareholder base.”

Shares are presently trading astatine 402 pence (about $5.43 successful U.S. dollars), aft spiking arsenic precocious arsenic 550.5 pence connected Wednesday.

The surge came pursuing a station connected X by idiosyncratic "aleabitoreddit" that touted Raspberry Pi arsenic a semipermanent trade. The basal of that lawsuit was that AI agents similar OpenClaw could thrust request for lower-cost computers. "People are openly buying Raspberry Pis and Apple Mac Minis for OpenClaw/PicoClaw," they argued, "so gross should payment from accrued demand."

The surge successful Raspberry Pi, which sells bare-bones devices for arsenic small arsenic $45, comes arsenic the AI roar is creating a shortage connected RAM and representation chips, driving the terms of astir user electronics (from PCs to TVs) higher.

Stock spikes driven by retail investors don't ever travel the aforesaid logic way arsenic different publically traded companies. Sometimes, investors from Reddit signifier a herd astatine the urging/logic of 1 user, which was the lawsuit with GameStop earlier that went connected to pb the meme banal movement. Earnings and profitability aren't ever factored into the investors' decisions.

Raspberry Pi isn't a GameStop, though. The institution reported $260 cardinal successful gross successful fiscal 2024, on with $63 cardinal successful gross profit. In the archetypal fractional of fiscal 2025, the institution reported gross nett of $33.2 million.