Why Raspberry Pi shares just surged 20%

Record half-year results have triggered upgrades, bullish price targets and a sharp uptick in the share price. City writer Graeme Evans has the details.

24th September 2026 12:32

by Graeme Evans from interactive investor

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The rollercoaster ride for Raspberry Pi Holdings (LSE:RPI) investors continued today after beat-and-raise results and bullish guidance sent the value of their shares up by as much as 23%.

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The FTSE 250-listed stock later settled 13% higher at 711p, which compares with June's peak of 1,082p after a previous upgrade in early June capped a strong run for shares.

The surge from 292p in March also reflected market speculation about AI enthusiasts using low-cost Raspberry Pi boards to run the agent OpenClaw as an autonomous digital assistant.

Today's return to form means that retail investors who received a maximum allocation of 365 shares in the company's oversubscribed 280p-a-share initial public offering (IPO) in June 2024, are sitting on a paper profit of about £1,547.

House broker Peel Hunt sees further upside to 1,085p after noting today that the maker of high-performance, low-cost general-purpose computing platforms was “going from strength-to-strength”.

It highlighted progress with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), as well as strong enthusiast demand and share gains triggered by AI, security and efficiency use-cases.

Peel Hunt added that the business is transitioning from a prototyping platform to a technology partner with OEMs ranging from smart homes to aerospace and defence.

The broker upgraded earnings estimates for this year and next by 14% and 23% respectively, having seen Raspberry Pi record a 90% jump in revenues to £256.9 million and double its underlying earnings to £40.3 million in the six months to 30 June.

The record figures reflected the benefit of Raspberry Pi's decision in 2025 to build significant strategic memory inventory.

This allowed it to maintain product availability at a time when smaller competitors struggled to secure allocation due to a period of significant supply chain disruption.

Whilst the “exceptional” unit economics achieved in first half results are likely to moderate, full-year underlying earnings are still expected to be ahead of the City consensus.

Founder and chief executive Eben Upton adds Raspberry Pi is “well positioned” for rapid growth in unit shipments in 2027 and beyond, reflecting the company's substantial order backlog, greater production capacity and a strong pipeline of opportunities.

Shipments increased by 17% to 4.2 million in the first half of 2026, taking the total since 2012 to 77 million across the company's three marketplaces of Industrial and Embedded, Enthusiast and Education and Semiconductors.

Demand has been particularly strong in the aerospace and defence sectors amid growing interest from national militaries in cost-effective computing for advanced autonomy.

In the Smart Home space, demand is being driven by factors including rising system complexity and higher expectations for connectivity and security.

Five new product and platform releases in the period included AI HAT+ 2, which has expanded the company's ability to capture a growing share of the edge-AI opportunity.

This enables customers to run more sophisticated AI workloads at the edge, including large-language and vision-language models which previously relied on more expensive hardware or on cloud infrastructure.

Raspberry Pi noted: “There is a substantial long-term opportunity to migrate intelligence from the cloud to the edge, delivering improvements in privacy, latency, reliability and operating cost.”

The company has also focused on building the organisational structures and capabilities that will allow it to scale further, “without sacrificing the high-performance culture that differentiates us from our competitors”.

This included the recruitment of Tim Mamtora as chief operating officer, having previously worked for Broadcom and Imagination Technologies. In addition, Tim Powell's imminent arrival as chief financial officer brings significant experience of public company and high-growth environments.

Upton said Raspberry had sufficient memory inventory in hand and on order to meet its 2026 production goals, while it will continue to make strategic purchases to ensure that it enters the 2027 financial year with a significant inventory position.

He added: “Looking beyond the current memory cycle, I am excited by the progress we are making across the business.

“We continue to expand our product portfolio, deepen customer relationships, strengthen our supply chain, and invest in the structures and capabilities required to support future growth.

“With a strong pipeline of OEM opportunities and increasing salience in key end markets, Raspberry Pi is well positioned for rapid growth in unit shipments in 2027 and beyond.”

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