These results are in good agreement with previous results suggesting that the reduction in AMPK activity is sufficient to increase HIF‐1α protein levels in cancer cells under normoxic conditions (Faubert et al., 2013) and with the notion that HIF‐1α regulates the expression of stem cell markers such as Oct4, Sox2 and Nanog in cancer cells (Lu et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2016). Here, SOX2 is linked to cancer.