Nanomaterials, regarded as the new materials of the 21st century, have been applied in the fields of chemical, electronics, defense, ceramics, etc. Traditional nanomaterial preparation methods have difficulties in particle size control, poor repeatability, and scale-up effect of industrial application. Process intensification (PI) technology is one of the highly promising directions in the chemical engineering field. PI technology is aiming for the goal of reducing operation unit, decreasing equipment volume, increasing production capacity, and improving energy utilization efficiency by adopting new equipments and new processes for the chemical industry, because the new process may lead the chemical industry to be more safe, friendly and efficient. Therefore, PI technology was superior to conventional methods. Through adjusting preparation time and energy efficiency, nanomaterials with particular morphology and properties could be obtained in some instances. In the past two decades, process intensification has been widely used for nanomaterial preparation, obtaining economic and social benefits, which has attracted more and more attention from scientific researchers. In this work, combining some typical examples, the recent developments in using PI technology for the preparation of nanomaterials as well as their related applications were reviewed, the characterizations and advantages of macrostructure chemical process were summarized, applications of process intensification technologies, such as hypergravity, micro chemical engineering, plasma, ultrasound, microwave, and ionic liquid, for the preparation of nanomaterials were reviewed and prospects were also discussed.