The present work is an alternative methodology in order to balance a nonlinear highly flexible rotor by using neural networks. This procedure was developed aiming at improving the performance of classical balancing methods, which are developed in the context of linearity between acting forces and resulting displacements and are not well adapted to these situations. In this paper a fully experimental procedure using neural networks is implemented for dealing with the adaptive balancing of nonlinear rotors. The nonlinearity results from the large displacements measured due to the high flexibility of the foundation. A neural network based meta-model was developed to represent the system. The initialization of the learning procedure of the network is performed by using the influence coefficient method and the adaptive balancing strategy is prone to converge rapidly to a satisfactory solution. The methodology is tested successfully experimentally.