Who Bought National Instruments? What NI Is Doing Now With Penang, Battery Plants, And The DuraForce Pro 3

If you've been searching for national instruments lately, I understand the confusion. One search tells you a huge industrial company bought it. Another search brings up a rugged phone called the DuraForce Pro 3. Then there's a battery plant in Kansas. On the surface, none of these fit together. Here's the thing: they're more connected than you'd expect.

I'm an application engineer who has supported test and measurement systems for over a decade. In the last two years, I've answered one question more than any other: "Who bought National Instruments?" The second most common question is "What is National Instruments doing now?" This article is my direct answer to both.

The Short Answer: Who Bought National Instruments?

Emerson Electric bought National Instruments. The all-cash deal was announced in April 2023 and completed in October 2023. According to Emerson's closing announcement, the price was $60 per share, which valued NI at roughly $8.2 billion. NI now essentially operates as a business unit within Emerson's automation portfolio.

If you need one sentence to remember: NI is no longer an independent company, but it's still making the same kinds of test and measurement products.

"I heard NI was bought. Is my PXI system going to be stranded?" — that's the conversation I've had more than a hundred times.

Comparison 1: Independent NI vs. Emerson-Owned NI

When I first heard about the acquisition, I assumed Emerson would dismantle NI. I thought LabVIEW would be quietly abandoned, PXI would be folded into a larger automation group, and the engineering culture would disappear. I was wrong.

Before the acquisition, NI was a public company with a strong measurement brand but a relatively small footprint in heavy industry. Emerson is the opposite: a massive industrial automation company with a huge installed base and a need to measure physical data in real time. That's the key to understanding the deal.

Emerson didn't buy NI to kill test and measurement. It bought NI because measurement hardware gives Emerson a way to connect factory control systems to the data that lives on the factory floor. The NI brand is less visible in Emerson's marketing now, but the capability is more deeply embedded in Emerson's sales strategy.

Verdict: Independent NI was a test equipment maker. Emerson-owned NI is the measurement layer inside a larger automation story.

Comparison 2: National Instruments Penang vs. A Headquarter-Only Brand

If you searched for national instruments penang, you're probably trying to figure out whether NI's Malaysian operation still matters after the acquisition. It does.

NI Penang has been around for more than two decades. The facility is on the island of Penang, in the Bayan Lepas area, and it handles the kind of manufacturing that test hardware requires. This is not a consumer electronics factory producing millions of identical units. It's high-mix, lower-volume production. A CompactDAQ thermocouple input module and a PXI digitizer might be built on the same line, but configured differently for different industries.

One thing I've noticed in the last 18 months is that NI Penang's engineering and supply chain roles are still being posted. The facility is actually still doing production, calibration, and supplier engineering. That's not what a wind-down looks like.

Verdict: National Instruments Penang is not a relic. It's one of the strongest signals that the hardware side of NI is still alive.

Comparison 3: What Is National Instruments Doing Now? Individual Products vs. Industrial Systems

Ask the old National Instruments what it made, and the answer was products: PXI systems, CompactRIO controllers, LabVIEW, DAQ modules. Ask the new National Instruments what it does, and the answer is more likely to be something like industrial test and measurement infrastructure.

What is National Instruments doing now? It's doing three things that customers actually see:

• Selling and supporting the familiar hardware families, but with more emphasis on long-term service contracts.
• Integrating NI software into Emerson's industrial software stack. That means more APIs, not fewer.
• Building data acquisition systems for large manufacturing sites, especially battery plants and renewable energy facilities.

The counterintuitive conclusion here is that the Emerson acquisition may have extended the life of NI's hardware, not ended it. Emerson wants predictable recurring revenue, and the best way to generate that from measurement equipment is to support it for a long time.

Verdict: The product names haven't changed much. The business model has. You're no longer buying a box; you're buying a long-term measurement relationship.

The Connection Nobody Searched For: Battery Plant Kansas and DuraForce Pro 3

Now let's talk about the search terms that seem unrelated.

Battery plant kansas is almost certainly the Panasonic Energy EV battery plant in De Soto, Kansas. Panasonic announced that project in 2022, and it's the kind of facility that needs measurement systems at a staggering scale. Battery production lines have to measure voltage, temperature, current, pressure, and weld quality at thousands of points. Those measurements need to be synchronized and traceable. That's a classic data acquisition problem.

Then there's the DuraForce Pro 3. It's not a National Instruments product. It's a rugged Android smartphone made by Sonim. But it belongs in this conversation because it's a field worker's device. Battery plant technicians use rugged phones like the DuraForce Pro 3 to look at wiring diagrams, log maintenance notes, and call an engineer when a test rack goes down.

So what's the connection? The test rack and the phone are part of the same industrial workflow. One sends data back to a central system. The other lets a technician act on that data. National Instruments builds the measurement infrastructure, and rugged phones like the DuraForce Pro 3 are the human interface to the same environment.

Verdict: These terms are not actually random. They're all pieces of the same modern factory story.

Should You Choose NI in 2025? My Scenario-Based Advice

Let me be specific. I'd rather spend ten minutes helping you understand the current situation than have you make a decision based on a panic search at 11 p.m.

Choose NI if:

• You already have NI hardware or LabVIEW code in your product line. Rip-and-replace is rarely worth it.
• You need high-channel-count measurement with deterministic timing, like battery test or structural monitoring.
• You want a large company with a support contract behind the hardware.

Think twice if:

• You only need a simple USB data logger. NI will not be the cheapest option, and Emerson hasn't changed that.
• You hate vendor platforms. NI is more open than it used to be, but it's still a platform company.
• You expect the old startup culture. That version of NI is gone. The new version is steadier but less quirky.

I have a customer story that explains why this matters. Last quarter, a production manager called about a failed DAQ module on a battery test line. The line was down, and the replacement lead time was three days. We shipped a certified replacement overnight because the customer had a current service contract. If they'd saved $600 on a gray-market board, they would have spent thousands in engineering labor and still missed their deadline.

That's the real lesson of the acquisition. Who bought National Instruments matters less than what you can still get from it. Emerson bought NI, NI Penang is still producing, battery plants are still being commissioned, and the DuraForce Pro 3 is still in a technician's pocket. The ecosystem is not dead. It's just more industrial now.

Bottom Line

Who bought National Instruments? Emerson, in 2023. What is National Instruments doing now? It's becoming the measurement arm of a much larger automation company. Is National Instruments Penang still important? Yes. Does a battery plant in Kansas have anything to do with a rugged phone called the DuraForce Pro 3? More than you'd think.

Informed customers make better decisions. That's why I wrote this article the way I did: no hype, no panic, just the comparison that matters. NI is not the company it was ten years ago. It's also not the abandoned product line some people fear. It's something in between, and if you understand the direction, you can plan accordingly.