This article proposes an efficient adaptive robust control for the eight-pole active magnetic bearing based on a heteropolar structure. Due to the uncertain behavior of active magnetic bearing, the mathematical model of active magnetic bearing is considered to be highly nonlinear and uncertain. As the rotor displacement and velocity are the measurable states, sliding mode control is designed to estimate state variables. Also, a matched disturbance term is used to deal with undesirable disturbances in the active magnetic bearing system. The controller is developed for an active magnetic bearing using the event-triggering-based sliding mode control technique. However, the stability of the proposed scheme has been achieved with the help of Lyapunov theory. Furthermore, the adaptive gain scheduling approach based on a neural network has been augmented to adjust the gain of the proposed controller for active magnetic bearing adaptively. The simulation studies have been performed in detail to demonstrate the use of proposed scheme for the robust control of active magnetic bearings. Finally, a comparative analysis of the proposed control design scheme with a conventional controller has been performed to achieve improved performance satisfying the plant constraints.