Raspberry Pi has been selling AI HAT+ boards for over a year, which enable Pi boards to run lightweight machine learning models for object detection, file tagging, and other tasks. We now have a Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2, which is powerful enough to run large-scale language models (LLM).
The new Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 is an add-on board for the Raspberry Pi 5 with a Halio-10H chip and 8GB of dedicated RAM. It can achieve inference performance of 40 TOPS (IN4). This is close to the 40-60 TOPS of neural processing units (NPUs) found in new PC chips from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm.
You can now run large language models such as Llama 3.2 1B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill 1.5B, Qwen2.5-Coder 1.5B, Qwen2.5-Instruct 1.5B, and Qwen2 1.5B, and Raspberry Pi says additional models with larger parameter sizes are in development. 8GB RAM isn’t enough for models like GPT-OSS or the regular DeepSeek, but it’s no wonder Gemma 3 1B and other smaller models will eventually be supported.
However, this board is not just for LLMs. It runs on the same camera software stack as the original AI HAT+, allowing you to set up vision-based models for object detection, pose estimation, and other machine learning workflows. Raspberry Pi says the performance of vision models like Yolo is “nearly on par with its 26-TOPS predecessors, thanks to onboard RAM.”
“Cloud-based LLMs from OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic have parameters in the 500 billion to 2 trillion range,” Raspberry Pi said in a blog post. “The edge-based LLMs running on the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 are sized to fit within the available onboard RAM and typically operate with 1 to 7 billion parameters. is not designed to match the knowledge set available in a larger model, but rather to work within a larger model.” Constrained dataset. ”
If you’re working on a project that could benefit from machine learning or generative AI models, such as a camera that detects birds flying outside your window or a text-to-speech engine, Raspberry Pi 5 with AI HAT+ 2 could be the way to go. We hope that the list of available models will grow over time and that the list of features will continue to expand.
Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 is available for purchase from authorized stores starting today for $130. This is slightly more expensive than the price of a single Raspberry Pi with 8GB RAM (currently $95).
Source: Raspberry Pi
