Why everyone wants a piece of Raspberry Pi

The valuation of the FTSE 250-listed maker of mini computers briefly hit £1bn last month. CEO Eben Upton talks to Barney Macintyre about volatile markets, UK tech and the craze for hosting powerful Al claw ‘agents’ on local hardware

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What did it feel like to get caught in a meme-stock frenzy?

I think there was a tweet by somebody in the WallStreetBets world, promoting the idea that there is a trade here. Obviously, there’s some froth right now about local agents. It’s something which is very new and a little bit unproven. But if this is a thing with the enthusiasts now, that might be a canary in the coalmine that the future of AI, on an industry level, might be more about what you do locally, at the edge, in a low-latency, low-cost, privacy-aware and security-aware way. It might be as much about that as it is about building massive data centres.

So the appetite for minicomputers is driven by safety concerns?

It's scary for individuals and companies if people decide they want to run these quite insecure platforms on shared hardware that you also do other things with. Maybe you connect it to your WhatsApp or email account, or your bank account. That's what’s motivated this idea about people buying Mac minis or buying Raspberry Pis in order to run OpenClaw (an autonomous Al agent).