Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Raspberry Pi’s valuation hit £1bn for the first time in nine months on Wednesday as retail investors seized on the AI potential of the British low-cost computer maker.
Shares almost doubled between Monday and midday on Wednesday, before losing ground in afternoon trading to close 1.2 per cent lower at £4.10, leaving the Cambridge-based company valued at just over £800mn.
Traders were enthused by social media posts that pointed to a sudden surge in demand for Raspberry Pi’s credit card-sized computers among AI hobbyists.
The devices offer a low-cost way to run OpenClaw, the AI tool whose popularity has erupted in recent weeks, culminating in its creator Peter Steinberger being hired by OpenAI last weekend.
OpenClaw was initially released under the name Clawdbot in November. It has been hailed as the first successful example of a “personal AI agent” that can run locally on a personal computer, in contrast to chatbots such as ChatGPT that operate largely in the cloud. It can be used for tasks such as writing emails and replying to WhatsApp messages.
Running OpenClaw on Raspberry Pi delivers “‘good enough’ functionality at near-zero incremental cost” for many users, Damindu Jayaweera, analyst at Peel Hunt, wrote in a note to clients this week. It also offered the “key benefit: owning the compute rather than renting it from the cloud”.
OpenClaw also spawned Moltbook, a social network for AI agents that briefly excited Silicon Valley figures including Elon Musk and AI researcher Andrej Karpathy earlier this month.
Alongside Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, a coding tool for non-technical users, the emergence of OpenClaw has contributed to stock market jitters across a wide range of sectors, from business software and wealth management to trucking and logistics. That is because some investors have begun to panic about the potentially disruptive effects of AI agents on white-collar work.
Many early adopters of OpenClaw have been experimenting with the open-source tool using Apple Mac computers, which typically cost at least $600 in the US.
However, the software is also simple to install on a Raspberry Pi costing as little as $100, with the added benefit of containing potential cyber security risks associated with installing OpenClaw on a user’s main computer, which could expose personal data.
“Silicon Valley start-ups and individuals anecdotally appear to be buying tens or hundreds of these things to run concurrent OpenClaw agentic swarms,” wrote Serenity, a social media stockpicker, in a widely circulated post on X on Monday.
The behaviour of Raspberry Pi stock bore the hallmarks of a GameStop-esque “meme-narrative” frenzy, said Ivan Ćosović, founder of data provider Breakout Point. “A prominent social media post, a share price that looks optically discounted, and big shorts that can be framed as opposition.”
Retail investors’ interest in the company surged this week, investment platforms said. The number of people buying the stock on Interactive Investor more than tripled on Tuesday, compared with the average level of the previous 30 days.
AJ Bell said trading activity on its platform on Monday and Tuesday alone was more than double the whole previous week, although volumes on both days were relatively small.
“OpenClaw is just one example of what becomes possible when AI runs locally on a device rather than in the cloud,” Raspberry Pi said. “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.”
Jayaweera said: “For investors, this is not about one tool. It is evidence of a broader shift. As AI models and agents become more efficient, inference is moving from centralized cloud servers to cheap, distributed edge devices.”
Raspberry Pi became a rare example of a new London tech listing in June 2024. After peaking at almost double its initial public offering price early last year, the stock had languished until this week. That was partly due to concerns about the impact of memory supply shortages — and the subsequent rapid rise in the price of DRam (dynamic random access memory) — on its bargain devices.
Raspberry Pi last month warned of “significant uncertainty as to the timing of a return to more normal DRam pricing and availability” and that while it had enough inventory for the first half of this financial year, visibility beyond that period was limited.