Machine tools, as an indispensable equipment in the manufacturing industry, are widely used in industrial production. The harsh and complex working environment can easily cause the failure of machine tools during operation, and there is an urgent requirement to improve the fault diagnosis ability of machine tools. Through the identification of the operating state (OS) of the machine tools, defining the time point of machine tool failure and the working energy-consuming unit can be assessed. In this way, the fault diagnosis time of the machine tool is shortened and the fault diagnosis ability is improved. Aiming at the problems of low recognition accuracy, slow convergence speed and weak generalization ability of traditional OS recognition methods, a deep learning method based on data-driven machine tool OS recognition is proposed. Various power data (such as signals or images) of CNC machine tools can be used to recognize the OS of the machine tool, followed by an intuitive judgement regarding whether the energy-consuming units included in the OS are faulty. First, the power data are collected, and the data are preprocessed by noise reduction and cropping using the data preprocessing method of wavelet transform (WT). Then, an AlexNet Convolutional Neural Network (ACNN) is built to identify the OS of the machine tool. In addition, a parameter adaptive adjustment mechanism of the ACNN is studied to improve identification performance. Finally, a case study is presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. To illustrate the superiority of this method, the approach was compared with traditional classification methods, and the results reveal the superiority in the recognition accuracy and computing speed of this AI technology. Moreover, the technique uses power data as a dataset, and also demonstrates good progress in portability and anti-interference.