Cell metabolism has been widely studied in cancer development since Otto Warburg’s description of overwhelmed glycolysis in cancer cells in the 1920s. Accumulated evidence demonstrates that cancer cells upon hypoxia and nutrient stress could hijack and reprogram variously metabolic pathways, including anabolism and catabolism, to produce essential precursors for biomass synthesis to sustain cell survival and proliferation. In addition, metabolic alterations control cellular events at multiple levels such as transcription, epigenetics, translation and posttranslational modification, eventually play an essential role during cancer initiation and progression. Therefore, dysregulation of cancer metabolism has been generally recognized as one of the ten hallmarks of cancer. During last three decades, especially in the recent decade, studies on oncogenes, tumor suppressors, growth factor-associated signaling pathways, and cancer microenvironment, which sequentially take center stage of cancer biology research, reveal that the cancer metabolism is regulated by reciprocal interaction between cancer cells and surrounding microenvironment. Elucidating the function and mechanism of cancer microenvironment-mediated metabolism reprogramming will provide potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets and fundamentally improve diagnosis and prognosis of cancer patients.