Malignant tumors are seriously harmful to human health. At present, there are mainly three ways to treat them: surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. However, the curative effect is not satisfactory. So it is very urgent to find a new target for tumor treatment and achieve targeted treatment. Warburg effect is common in many kinds of tumors. Its important feature is that under the condition of sufficient oxygen, the energy metabolism of cancer cells is still dominated by glycolysis. Warburg effect is a typical process of glycolysis in which glucose is absorbed in large quantities and converted into lactic acid by glycolysis. Lactate, a glycolytic product, can activate many important signaling pathways in cancer cells, and promote the survival, invasion, immune escape, metastasis and angiogenesis of cancer cells. Therefore, targeting lactate metabolism and its key enzymes may provide new targets for tumor therapy. This paper reviews the metabolic process of lactate, the change of lactate metabolism mode of tumor cells, the immune escape of lactate to tumor cells, tumor metastasis, tumor angiogenesis, and the treatment of tumor with lactate as the target.