The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 is a compact HAT+ add-on that gives your Raspberry Pi 5 dedicated, on-device AI acceleration for fast inference without relying on cloud services. It uses a Hailo-10H neural network accelerator plus 8GB LPDDR4X onboard memory, making it well suited to real-time computer vision, speech-to-text, and selected smaller generative AI models running locally.

Compatibility is simple: it’s Raspberry Pi 5 only, connecting via PCI Express (PCIe) for low-latency, high-bandwidth performance. It’s not designed for earlier Raspberry Pi boards (like Pi 4/3/Zero) and won’t be a fit if your project requires a generic USB accelerator. At launch it supports models including Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, QWEN2.5-VL-3B, and Whisper (base), with support expected to expand as the software ecosystem matures.

Practical use cases include smart cameras (object detection/recognition), robotics and automation (real-time perception), offline voice transcription, and privacy-sensitive edge deployments where you don’t want data leaving the device. Compared with CPU-only inference on the Pi 5, the AI HAT+ 2 is dramatically faster and more power-efficient for supported models, and compared with USB-based accelerators it benefits from the Pi 5’s PCIe link for lower overhead and better sustained throughput. If you’re building an AI-capable Pi 5 stack, pair it with a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Raspberry Pi 5 Official Active Cooler for sustained performance: Raspberry Pi 5, Raspberry Pi 5 Official Active Cooler.