Hagerty's account of how Darryl Cuttell's drag racing empire came apart is, underneath the racing, a data center story. Darana Hybrid, the Ohio electro-mechanical contractor Cuttell owns, handled mechanical contracting at xAI's Colossus and Colossus II campuses in Memphis from 2024 through June 2026, roughly $1.5 billion of work, according to CompetitionPlus. In late July the company filed about $137 million in mechanics' liens: $118 million against the Tulane Road site in Whitehaven and $18 million against Paul Lowry Road, with roughly $400 million more planned against the Southaven, Mississippi plant, as Action News 5 reported. Cuttell put the total at "probably north of $600 million" and said "it was running smoothly until April when the new regime stepped in," pointing at the xAI and SpaceX merger. Darana in turn owes roughly $200 million to its own vendors. None of this has been tested in court.
An electro-mechanical contractor is the firm that puts in the power distribution, the wiring, and the cooling. Colossus went into a former Electrolux factory in 123 days, which is the compressed schedule this entire industry has spent two years celebrating. This is what the other side of that schedule looks like on a balance sheet. Somebody financed the acceleration, and it was not the hyperscaler: it was a contractor carrying payroll, material, and subcontractor invoices against progress billings that stopped arriving in April. The buildout is already short roughly 500,000 electricians and 550,000 plumbers, and the workforce gap has been the most cited barrier to liquid cooling adoption for two years. Payment risk on top of scarcity is how a thin subcontractor base gets thinner.
USW-Menard Inc. filed $2.2 million against a water treatment plant at the site, and TorcSill Foundations filed $65,000. A water treatment plant is not incidental equipment on a campus like this. It is the system that conditions cooling makeup and handles blowdown, and it is the piece that determines whether an operator can run its towers on anything other than potable municipal supply. Colossus has been drawing on the order of 812,000 gallons a day against the Memphis Sand aquifer, which is the single most scrutinized water story in American data center construction. A contractor lien against the treatment plant is a small number attached to the most politically exposed system on the property.
A mechanics' lien is public, dated, filed against a specific parcel, and carries a dollar figure somebody swore to. That makes the county recorder a better source on project health than any announcement, and it is a habit worth building. When the mechanical contractor on the highest-profile AI campus in the country files nine figures and admits owing nine figures downstream, the signal is not about one contractor. Switchgear procurement already sits on the critical path, and credit risk has been stalling neocloud and colocation deals for months.
The absurd-sounding version of this, that a payment dispute over data center cooling and power work cancelled a drag racing season, is the same mechanism that decides whether your CDU crew shows up in week eleven. Cooling installation in this market runs through a small number of mechanical contractors who are all bidding compressed schedules for customers who set every term. Anyone signing a liquid cooling scope for 2027 should be asking for payment history and lien records alongside bonding and references, and should assume the crew quoting the aggressive date is financing it themselves. That works right up until it does not.