<p>This paper provides an integrated material-structure design approach for energy efficiency performance improvement of induction motors (IMs) from the aspects of high-efficiency copper alloy rotor material selection and stator and rotor internal structure optimization. Firstly, a two-dimensional finite element analysis (FEA) model of IM is established based on the electromagnetic field theory, and the accuracy of the FEA model is verified by experiments. The effects of copper and eight different copper alloys as rotor bar materials on the loss, starting performance, and operating performance of IM are studied. On the basis of choosing copper alloy 1 # as the material of the rotor bar, this work also analyzes the influence of the slot combination, the air gap length, and the structural parameters of the stator and rotor on the performance of IM. Then, the parameters of the support vector regression (SVR) model are optimized by the gray wolf optimization (GWO), and the GWO-SVR model of total loss (<i>loss</i>_<i>total</i>), base speed (<i>n</i>_<i>b</i>) and efficiency (<i>η</i>) is established. Finally, a multi-objective thermal exchange optimization algorithm (MOTEOA) is used to drive the optimization process. The optimization results show that <i>loss</i>_<i>total</i> is reduced by 3.46%, and <i>n</i>_<i>b</i> and <i>η</i> are increased by 0.75% and 0.74%, respectively.</p>