Arm Invests in Raspberry Pi, Acquires a "Minority Stake" of the Popular Single-Board Computer Maker

Arm Holdings, the company behind the near-ubiquitous instruction set architecture which bears its name, has announced an investment in Raspberry Pi — acquiring "a minority stake" in the popular single-board computer maker.

"Arm and Raspberry Pi share a vision to make computing accessible for all, by lowering barriers to innovation so that anyone, anywhere can learn, experience, and create new IoT [Internet of Things] solutions,” claims Arm's Paul Williamson. "With the rapid growth of edge and endpoint AI [Artificial Intelligence] applications, platforms like those from Raspberry Pi, built on Arm, are critical to driving the adoption of high-performance IoT devices globally by enabling developers to innovate faster and more easily. This strategic investment is further proof of our continued commitment to the developer community, and to our partnership with Raspberry Pi."

"Arm technology has always been central to the platforms we create, and this investment is an important milestone in our longstanding partnership," adds Raspberry Pi chief executive officer Eben Upton. "Using Arm technology as the foundation of our current and future products offers us access to the compute performance, energy efficiency and extensive software ecosystem we need, as we continue to remove barriers to entry for everyone, from students and enthusiasts, to professional developers deploying commercial IoT systems at scale."

The investment, financial terms of which have not been made public, comes around a month after Upton spoke of interest in floating the firm on the London stock exchange at a $500 million valuation — and seven months after Sony, which runs the Welsh production facility which makes many of Raspberry Pi's boards, made its own "minority investment" in Raspberry Pi.

Since the very first Raspberry Pi model launched launched more than a decade ago, the company's products have used Arm processor IP; even its in-house microcontroller design, the Raspberry Pi RP2040, features a pair of Arm Cortex-M0+ cores. Five years ago, though, Raspberry Pi announced that it had become a paying member of the RISC-V Foundation — set up to encourage the adoption and evolve the ecosystem surrounding the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, which stands in direct competition to Arm's proprietary offerings.

Since that time, however, Raspberry Pi has made no public announcements regarding the adoption of RISC-V in its own products.