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Raspberry Pi's 16GB board reaches $385 as memory supply tightens

A fourth increase in a year takes the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 to more than triple its launch price, while a Science study traces a superconductor's missing electrons to pairs that form early.

A green Raspberry Pi 5 circuit board seen from above on a white background, with its metal-shielded processor, memory chip, USB and Ethernet ports, and 40-pin header visible.
Lead image A Raspberry Pi 5 board. The 16GB variant now lists at $385, more than three times its launch price, after four increases since December 2025. · Photo: SimonWaldherr / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0) · CC BY 4.0
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Raspberry Pi raised the price of its 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 by $80 to $385. The board cost $120 when it launched in January 2025, so it now sells for more than three times that price. The 16GB variants of the Compute Module 5 rose by $40 in the same round. The Pi 500+, an all-in-one desktop that also carries 16GB of memory, kept its price.

CEO Eben Upton blamed “a lack of alternative supply for 16GB DRAM, compounded by other ongoing component shortages”. The 16GB board has now been raised four times, starting in December 2025, when it went to $145. Increases in February and April took it to $305 before this month’s rise. The 8GB model lists at $175, so the extra memory on the larger board now costs more than a second board.

Raspberry Pi describes the increases as temporary and says it will roll them back when memory costs fall. Demand has not followed the price. Raspberry Pi says direct sales of the Pi 5 rose 47 percent in its most recent half-year. Memory suppliers have warned that tight supply could last until 2030.

Featured source: TechRadar , Raspberry Pi .

A cuprate superconductor’s missing electrons appear to be paired

In copper-oxide superconductors, measurements at certain energies find far fewer electrons than expected, a state known as the pseudogap. Physicists have argued for decades over whether those electrons freeze into static patterns or pair up before the material starts carrying current without resistance. A team led by Milan Allan of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Ingmar Swart of Utrecht University examined the question with a scanning tunneling microscope. Shot noise, the faint crackle of individual charges, rose at the energy where the electrons vanish, which is the signature of electrons arriving in pairs. Magnetic fields of up to six tesla suppressed the extra noise. The authors report pairing energies up to 70 milli-electron volts and conclude that phase coherence, not pairing, limits the critical temperature.

Filed from: Ars Technica , Science .

An audit finds 31 hallucinated citations in Accenture research

GPTZero examined three publications by Accenture researchers. It flagged 31 of 245 citations as hallucinated, meaning the cited work did not exist, carried a different author, or did not support the claim. Fifteen were in a policy paper on artificial intelligence and African value chains produced with the Global Policy Center at IE University. One reference in a paper from Accenture’s Bangalore lab pointed readers to a fake GitHub repository for a malicious chatbot. The repository held real malware until it was deleted. Accenture told The Telegraph the errors were human, and that there was no evidence they came from AI. It said the report is being corrected before a re-release.

Filed from: TechRadar , GPTZero .

Google’s energy chief puts orbital data centers at up to 100 times the cost on Earth

Amanda Peterson Corio, who leads data-center energy at Google, spoke at The Information’s WTF Summit. She said computing in orbit could cost up to 100 times as much as building on the ground, and that the industry should exhaust terrestrial options first. Her remarks came weeks after a Project Suncatcher prototype reached orbit with four tensor processing units and about one kilowatt of solar power. That is enough to run one chip at a time for roughly 20 minutes. Google calls the project a moonshot, and its lead said in October that he did not expect orbital compute to undercut ground costs within five years.

Filed from: TechRadar , Google .

The US cleared an Nvidia chip buyer whose listed office is empty

New Matrix, a Chinese company, was approved by the Commerce Department to buy Nvidia’s H200 accelerators. At its listed address, The New York Times found an empty office and no entry in the building directory. The paper reported that the firm was created 17 months ago, and that its owners have ties to a private equity company blacklisted by the United States since 2024. It described the approval as part of a wider pattern. Nvidia agreed to give the US government 15 percent of its China sales in exchange for looser export limits.

Filed from: The Verge , The New York Times .

Binance’s finance chief leaves days after a $6.3 billion theft

Binance’s chief financial officer, Kaiser Ng, is leaving the exchange after more than five years, with Justin Yek taking the role. The announcement came about a week after attackers stole $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency from Binance users, forcing a withdrawal freeze that lasted several days. Net withdrawals of $3.6 billion followed the unfreeze in the first few hours. Binance and the FBI attributed the theft to a North Korean group known as TraderTraitor. The company said it would absorb the losses rather than pass them to customers.

Filed from: TechCrunch .

From the Community

Microsoft Research’s AI Frontiers group ends after a reorganisation

John Langford, a Microsoft researcher, wrote that AI Frontiers, the group he helped create in 2023, is finished. The organisation of roughly 50 people built the AutoGen agent framework and the Fara computer-use agent. It was folded into Microsoft AI in early September. Langford said the merged group’s leadership treats scaling as the route to better models and shows little interest in research. He added that he and other founding leaders have left.

Filed from: Machine Learning (Theory) .

Nspawn 3.0 opens a Docker-compatible engine API to other tools

The Nspawn project released version 3.0, which serves a Docker Engine API at /run/nspawn/api.sock so software written for Docker can manage systemd-nspawn machines instead. The socket ships disabled and access runs through polkit actions. The project warns that any user allowed to manage containers is effectively root on the host. The API answers clients in the shapes of version 1.51 and earlier, covering container lifecycle, exec, archive copy, image pulls and networking. Image builds, swarm and plugins return 501.

Filed from: Nspawn 3.0 announcement .

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