This study presents an intelligent PID control method based on the fuzzy logic and this method is applied to the active magnetic bearing system. By using an appropriate fuzzy matrix, some changes of values of the three coefficients of the controller are determined during system operation and these lead to the improvement of the transient and steady state behavior of the closed loop system. The presented method is actually a combination of the principles of PID control and fuzzy logic. Since the fuzzy logic using linguistic variables in place of numeric variables has many points of likeness to the human logic, the improvement in performance is notable especially in case of large nonlinearity and uncertainty such as the controller start and the excessive mass unbalance. A set of simulation and experimental results illustrate and considerable improvement in the control performance including small overshoot and small transient currents in magnet coils, while maintaining the overal static and dynamic characteristics near the equilibrium position.