Raspberry Pi has become the latest stock to catch the AI hype bug, with the Cambridge outfit briefly nudging a £1bn (€1.15bn) valuation for the first time in nine months as retail punters piled in on its supposed AI potential.
Shares nearly doubled between Monday and midday on Wednesday, then eased to close 1.2 per cent lower at £4.10 (€4.70), leaving the company valued at just over £800mn (€917m).
The buzz was fuelled by social media chatter claiming a sudden jump in demand for Raspberry Pi’s credit card-sized computers among AI hobbyists.
The pitch is that the boards offer a cheap way to run OpenClaw, an AI tool that has blown up in recent weeks and got its creator, Peter Steinberger, hired by OpenAI last weekend.
OpenClaw launched in November under the name Clawdbot and has been pitched as a “personal AI agent” that runs locally, unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT which mostly live in the cloud.
It can be used for tasks such as writing emails and replying to WhatsApp messages.
Peel Hunt, analyst Damindu Jayaweera wrote: Running OpenClaw on Raspberry Pi delivers “‘good enough’ functionality at near-zero incremental cost” for many users. It offered the “key benefit: owning the compute rather than renting it from the cloud”.
OpenClaw spun out Moltbook, a social network for AI agents that briefly had Silicon Valley types, including Elon Musk and AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, getting a bit too excited earlier this month.
Alongside Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, a coding tool aimed at non-technical users, the arrival of OpenClaw has rattled investors across everything from business software and wealth management to trucking and logistics.
Early adopters have been tinkering with it on the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple Mac, which typically costs at least $600 (€507) in the US.
But it is simple to install on a Raspberry Pi costing as little as $100 (€84), while keeping any cybersecurity mess away from a user’s main computer and the personal data sitting on it.
X, social media stockpicker Serenity wrote: “Silicon Valley start-ups and individuals anecdotally appear to be buying tens or hundreds of these things to run concurrent OpenClaw agentic swarms.”
Breakout Point, founder Ivan Ćosović said: “A prominent social media post, a share price that looks optically discounted, and big shorts that can be framed as opposition.”
Investment platforms reported that retail interest surged, with the number of buyers on Interactive Investor more than tripling on Tuesday compared with the previous 30-day average.
Raspberry Pi said: “OpenClaw is just one example of what becomes possible when AI runs locally on a device rather than in the cloud. The company is seeing growing interest in running models directly on low-cost hardware as an alternative to relying entirely on large, cloud-based systems.”
Raspberry Pi floated in London in June 2024, peaked at almost double its IPO price early last year, then drifted as punters worried about memory supply shortages and the jump in DRAM prices.
The company warned last month of “significant uncertainty as to the timing of a return to more normal DRAM pricing and availability” and said that while it had enough inventory for the first half of this financial year, visibility beyond that period was limited.
