Offloading the work from the Raspberry Pi's CPU makes the AI HAT+ 2 an interesting prospect, but the flawed results make this a bit of a gamble. The $130 price tag and your project choice will ultimately decide your purchasing decision.
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Raspberry Pi’s first product of 2026 is an update of the 2024 AI HAT+, but this newer version, another collaboration with Hailo, now sees the Hailo 10H AI chip running the show, along with 8GB of onboard RAM. The new AI HAT+ 2 takes the strain of AI workloads away from the Raspberry Pi 5’s Arm CPU, but this all comes at a price of $130. With your Raspberry Pi already costing much more than the original $35 — of course, the spec has vastly improved over the years — you could already be hitting the $200 mark for just a Pi and AI HAT+ 2. Does the performance warrant the price? There's only one way to find out!
Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 Specifications
Swipe to scroll horizontally Header Cell - Column 0 AI HAT+ 2 AI HAT+ AI Accelerator Hailo-10H Hailo-8, Hailo-8L TOPS 40 (INT4) 26 (Image Inference / Computer Vision) 13 or 26 (Image Inference / Computer Vision) Price $130 13 TOPS $70 26 TOPS $110
Unboxing and Setup
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The retail box follows the same design language as the many other Raspberry Pi product boxes that I have opened. At a glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was the same Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ as released previously, and opening the box doesn’t help as the boards are very similar. The new AI HAT+ 2 requires the included heatsink. Yes, this heatsink is for the HAT, not the Raspberry Pi 5. Your Pi 5 will also need cooling, and the official Raspberry Pi and Argon low-profile coolers will fit under the HAT. The included plastic standoffs and GPIO header extension work, but the GPIO connection is a little too loose for my liking. The resulting GPIO connections, using DuPoint style connectors, also feel a little too loose.
Connecting the board to the Raspberry Pi 5 is simple. Just unlock the PCIe connection on the Pi 5, push in the ribbon cable, lock it down, and then secure the board to the standoffs and GPIO. There is a cut-out for connecting the official Raspberry Pi Camera and an official display. Connect up your keyboard, mouse, HDMI, Ethernet, and finally power, then boot to the Raspberry Pi desktop, remembering of course to enable PCIe Gen 3 via “raspi-config.” We’re using the latest Debian “Trixie” based image and have a custom installation process as our review unit predates the official software repositories. The end-user software experience will be streamlined for release.
What Models Can the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 Hailo 10H Run?
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