Comment by wongarsu

The real punishment arguably already happened. This could have been a feel-good project with lots of positive PR: a datacenter built far from major population centers, in a place with lots of available water that isn't used for anything else, in a country with relatively cheap electricity that is overwhelmingly produced from nuclear, hydro and wind. Amid all the negative datacenter PR it could have been a project Google could point to where every single objection has been addressed. Instead it has become a PR disaster that has been dragged through the news cycle and social media's outrage cycle.