Acrisure Arena opened on December 14, 2022, with a comedy show — Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle performing together — before the building's primary tenant, the Coachella Valley Firebirds, played their first home game four days later. That game, a 4-3 victory over the Tucson Roadrunners, drew a sellout of 10,087 people. The arena is the first major sports and entertainment venue built in the Coachella Valley, a region of nearly half a million permanent residents that had previously supported no facility of this scale. Its construction required assembling 43.35 acres between the interstate and the Classic Club golf course, creating a site visible from the air and from the highway approach to the valley.

The Coachella Valley Firebirds are the American Hockey League affiliate of the Seattle Kraken, meaning the best young prospects in the Kraken organization play their developmental seasons in the desert. The team's name references the Firebird — a mythological creature associated with rebirth, which in a new hockey market carries appropriate symbolism — and the Coachella Valley's established identity as a place of heat and intensity. The team's 2022-23 season ended in the Calder Cup Finals, the AHL's championship series, where the Firebirds drew more than 138,000 fans across 16 playoff home games. That figure broke the AHL's single-season home attendance record, a remarkable outcome for a franchise in its first year of existence in a market with no prior professional hockey history.

Beyond hockey, Acrisure Arena has positioned itself as the Coachella Valley's primary destination for major touring acts. Olivia Rodrigo opened her Guts World Tour at the arena on February 23, 2024 — a choice that made the desert venue the first stop on one of that year's most-anticipated concert tours. The same night also served as the first arena show for Chappell Roan, who appeared as a supporting act before her own trajectory accelerated dramatically later in the year. The arena is approximately 55 miles from the Coachella Music Festival site, which places it within the geography that a generation of music fans has associated with the desert — a fact that presumably informed decisions about how to book the building.

The arena's 10,000-seat capacity is calibrated to a regional market rather than a major metropolitan one, but the Coachella Valley's seasonality creates unusual dynamics. The valley's winter population swells significantly with seasonal residents from colder climates — exactly the demographic that grew up watching hockey and might welcome a professional team in its winter home. Whether that overlap was calculated or fortuitous, it contributed to early success. The building itself sits at the eastern edge of Palm Desert, adjacent to the highway interchange and the golf course landscape that defines much of the eastern valley. From the interstate it announces itself clearly, a modern arena in the middle of a desert that now has a professional sports team, a 10,000-seat venue, and an attendance record to defend.