The flux-linkage characteristics of bearingless induction motors (BIMs) are nonlinear, and the models established by the general analytical method cannot accurately reflect the actual characteristics of BIMs. Thus, a novel method for nonlinear modeling of BIM flux linkage is proposed in this paper. The main objective of this method is to improve the accuracy of the flux linkage model based on the least square support vector machine (LSSVM) technique by applying the gray wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm to determine the optimal kernel parameter and regularization parameter of the LSSVM automatically. In this method, all BIMs flux linkage data are obtained from the finite-element method. In this paper, the relationship between input and output of the nonlinear flux linkage model is studied, and the precision model of GWO-LSSVM flux linkage is obtained. The simulation results demonstrate that the GWO-LSSVM model has high prediction accuracy and strong prediction ability. In addition, the GWO-LSSVM model is compared with other models. From this simulation comparison, it can be concluded that GWO-LSSVM modeling has the characteristics of higher accuracy. INDEX TERMS Bearingless induction motor, gray wolf optimization, least squares support vector machine, nonlinear model, finite element analysis.