> If you sell Google a great big slice of land to build a DC, I don't think it's very surprising they cut down the trees

When you own a piece of land containing a forest area there are typically (in most of europe at least) certain rules and regulation as to what you can do and what sort of permissions you need. Eg you may be required to keep some patches of the forest vs just cutting down everything, there can be places you cannot clear the forest completely etc.

Even if google could eventually anyway build some datacenters in that area, it does not mean that they were allowed to do what they did.

But otherwise I agree that this transaction should never have happened in the first place.