Sliding mode control and disturbance compensation techniques are applied to a nonlinear speed control algorithm for a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM). Optimizing the speed control performance of PMSM systems with various disturbances and uncertainties is challenging. To achieve a satisfactory performance, a sliding mode control method based on the super-twisting algorithm reaching law (STRL) is presented. STRL can adapt dynamically to the variations of a controlled system. The STRL maintains a high tracking performance of the controller and allows the control input to eliminate chattering. To estimate the uncertainties and compensate for disturbances, a support vector regression-disturbance observer (SVR-DOB) is presented. The estimated uncertainties were used to minimize modeling errors and improve the disturbance rejection. A controller using SVR-DOB achieves a high precision, and the simulation results demonstrated the validity of the proposed control approach.