🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Raspberry Pi’s growth is driven by margin management, not headline revenue

• Contrary to a narrative of soaring sales, Raspberry Pi’s recent performance has been flat, with first-half 2025 gross profit of £33.2 million, slightly below £34.2 million a year earlier 1.
• Raspberry Pi is shifting more sales to direct-to-original equipment manufacturer (OEM) channels, which sell straight to device makers and can bring about three times the profit per unit versus the licensee channel in illustrative terms 1.
• The company has kept pricing steady and has focused on costs. The main processor for the Raspberry Pi 5 costs about $5 less per unit than it did for the first 2 million boards in 2024 1.
• It says it has hedged against swings in memory prices through substantial LPDDR4 (Low-Power Double Data Rate 4, a type of mobile memory) inventories and coverage into 2026, with greater exposure at higher densities 1.

A hardware company’s push into semiconductors and AI acceleration (mostly via partners)

• In H1 2025, the company sold chips for the first time, which it called a strategic milestone though the financial impact remains small 1.
• Raspberry Pi calls its boards a “shop window” for its microcontrollers (small chips that control devices), such as the RP2040, and it wants semiconductors to contribute roughly as much economically over the next decade 1.
• The approach fits the shift toward edge AI, where processing runs locally for privacy and speed.
• On AI acceleration, Raspberry Pi relies mainly on Hailo (a company that makes chips designed to speed up AI inference on devices) for the AI Kit and AI HAT (Hardware Attached on Top, an add-on board format for Raspberry Pi) 1. It plans another product in the line in the fourth quarter with better support for modern and generative workloads, including large language models (LLMs) 1.