Return of the meme stock? Raspberry Pi stock has jumped 50% in the past week

Raspberry Pi, the maker of basic, cheap computers, is in the midst of a retail investor stock frenzy that brings the glory days of GameStop $GME to mind. Over the past week, shares in the company, which trades on the London Stock Exchange, have increased nearly 50%.

The spike came as a surprise to pretty much everyone, including CEO Eben Upton, who was on vacation when the sharp rise began.

“It does seem like people are picking us for these applications,” Upton told Bloomberg. “I don’t know if ‘meme stock’ is a slur or not. There is obviously a retail element to our shareholder base.”

Shares are currently trading at 402 pence (about $5.43 in U.S. dollars), after spiking as high as 550.5 pence on Wednesday.

The surge came following a post on X $TWTR by user "aleabitoreddit" that touted Raspberry Pi as a long-term trade. The base of that case was that AI agents like OpenClaw could drive demand for lower-cost computers. "People are openly buying Raspberry Pis and Apple $AAPL Mac Minis for OpenClaw/PicoClaw," they argued, "so revenue should benefit from increased demand."

The surge in Raspberry Pi, which sells bare-bones devices for as little as $45, comes as the AI boom is creating a shortage on RAM and memory chips, driving the price of most consumer electronics (from PCs to TVs) higher.

Stock spikes driven by retail investors don't always follow the same logic trail as other publicly traded companies. Sometimes, investors from Reddit $RDDT form a herd at the urging/logic of one user, which was the case with GameStop before that went on to lead the meme stock movement. Earnings and profitability aren't always factored into the investors' decisions.

Raspberry Pi isn't a GameStop, though. The company reported $260 million in revenue in fiscal 2024, along with $63 million in gross profit. In the first half of fiscal 2025, the company reported gross profit of $33.2 million.