Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) has the highest metastatic potential among head and neck cancers. Distant metastasis is the major cause of treatment failure. The role of interleukin-8 (IL-8) in NPC progression remains unknown. Our multivariate survival analyses of 255 patients with NPC revealed that higher IL-8 expression in primary NPC tissue was an independent prognostic factor for overall survival, disease-free survival, and distant metastasis-free survival of the patients. In vitro study revealed that IL-8 was highly expressed in the established high-metastasis NPC clone S18 relative to the low-metastasis cells. Suppression of IL-8 by short-hairpin RNA reduced the expression of IL-8 in S18 cells and subsequently inhibited migration, invasion, and hepatic metastasis of the cells without influencing cellular growth. Overexpression of IL-8 in S26 cells resulted in increased migration, invasion, and metastasis capabilities of the cells without affecting cellular growth. Exogenous IL-8 enhanced the migration and invasion of low-metastasis CNE-2 cells in a dose-dependent manner. An epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) could be induced by IL-8 in various NPC cell lines. The high level of phosphorylated AKT in S18 cells could be suppressed by knocking down IL-8 expression. Further, IL-8-promoted migration and invasion could be abolished by either the application of the phosphoinositide-3-kinase inhibitor LY294002 or the knock down of AKT expression by using small-interfering RNA. In summary, IL-8 serves as an independent prognostic indicator of overall survival, disease-free survival, and metastasis-free survival for patients with NPC. IL-8 promotes NPC metastasis via autocrine and paracrine means, involving activation of AKT signaling and inducing EMT in NPC cells.