In this study, a novel intelligent inverter fault diagnosis approach based on a stacked denoising autoencoder–generative adversarial network–long short-term memory (SDAE-GAN-LSTM) under an imbalanced sample is proposed for a three-phase permanent-magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive system. The proposed method can address the problem of unbalanced fault data samples and improve the accuracy of fault classification. Concretely speaking, firstly, the stacked denoising autoencoder (SDAE) is pre-trained to obtain the optimum decoder network. Afterward, a new generator of generative adversarial networks (GANs) is designed to generate high-quality samples by migrating the pre-trained optimal decoder network to the hidden layer and output layer of the generator of GANs. Additionally, a new model of long short-term memory (LSTM) based on the second discriminator of the GANs is presented for fault diagnosis. The generator of GANs is cross-trained using the reconstruction error gained by SDAE and the fault diagnosis error obtained by LSTM, resulting in the generation of high-quality samples for fault discrimination. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault diagnosis approach, and the average fault identification accuracy reaches 98.63%.