A catering contract would usually be a minor footnote for a company of Meta’s size. This one is different. The deal does not move the numbers, but it does offer a rare, tangible sign of how far the group’s footprint has spread as it pours billions into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
French services company Sodexo said this week it had won one of the largest food-service contracts in its history, with Meta as the client. The agreement will cover more than 130 sites in over 30 countries, including office campuses, smaller branches, conference centers and data centers. The rollout is set to begin gradually over the coming months.
Sodexo chief executive Thierry Delaporte credited the win to the company’s 60 years in hospitality and the strength of its local management teams. The contract emerged from a broad tender process.
The operational detail stands in sharp contrast to the scale of Meta’s current priorities. The company is spending heavily to build out its AI capacity, and that push is also reshaping its global real estate and infrastructure needs. New data centers require electricity, cooling and, in the simplest sense, canteens for thousands of workers. The Sodexo agreement is a small but unusually concrete marker of that expansion.
Meta’s share price has so far brushed aside both the contract and a separate set of pressures that have been building around the company. In Europe, the EU Commission said on 16 July 2026 that its preliminary findings under the Digital Services Act suggest Meta did not do enough to protect Facebook and Instagram users from “addictive” features. Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission vice-president responsible for technological sovereignty, security and democracy, said the investigation — running since 2024 — focused on the protection of minors and other vulnerable groups, including how much time teenagers spend on the apps at night. If the preliminary findings are confirmed and Meta does not make changes, the company could face significant fines under the DSA.
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At the same time, Meta is dealing with a lawsuit in Oakland federal court brought by 26 anonymous former employees. They say the company used an AI system to select workers for a mass layoff in May 2026, and that the system disproportionately affected employees on protected leave, including medical leave and disability leave. According to the complaint, the models evaluated factors such as productivity and “token usage” without taking approved absences into account. Meta has denied the allegations, saying human managers make personnel decisions rather than automated systems.
The legal and regulatory issues have not derailed the stock. Meta closed on Thursday at EUR 579.10, after gaining 17.37 percent over the past 30 days. In the other report, the shares ended at EUR 580.60, up 17.67 percent over the same period. They remain about 11 percent above the 50-day average of EUR 522.40, while still sitting 14.34 percent below the 52-week high of EUR 677.80 and nearly 15 percent short of the record reached in July 2025.
Investors are currently focused less on side issues such as catering contracts than on Meta’s capital-spending plans and its still-early cloud business. The “cloud pivot” and the expansion of the Hyperion data center in Louisiana have helped fuel the recent rally. Meta also said it cut 10 percent of staff in the second quarter of 2026, even as first-quarter revenue reached USD 56.31 billion, a 33 percent increase from a year earlier.
Another date is coming up quickly. On 17 July, the deadline expires for companies that want to participate in Meta’s tender tied to emissions reduction, part of its net-zero strategy for 2030 with a focus on the steel and semiconductor industries.
The next major checkpoint is still the one that matters most: Meta reports second-quarter earnings after the close on 29 July 2026. That update will likely determine whether the company’s aggressive investment cycle, regulatory headaches and legal disputes continue to sit in the background — or start to weigh more heavily on the market’s view of the stock.
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