Sat Singh founded AI Coachella Valley in 2025, but the idea behind it had been forming for years.
He has spent most of his life starting things — sometimes on his own, sometimes with partners, sometimes from inside larger companies. The industries changed, but the instinct was usually the same: see something that could exist, then try to make it real.
After co-founding a gaming studio that was acqui-hired by King.com, Sat spent close to fifteen years wanting to build a founders' studio in the Coachella Valley — a physical place where people came to make things, not simply serve the people who came to visit.
For a while, he thought artificial intelligence might be the catalyst.
Between 2014 and 2016, he built and funded startups around natural language and machine learning, working with the early Alexa, Google Home and DeepMind era. After three years, the conclusion was fairly clear. The idea was ahead of the technology.
Then ChatGPT arrived in November 2022.
Having spent years around an earlier, underpowered version of the same promise, Sat recognized immediately that something had changed.
His concern was not whether the Coachella Valley had access to AI. For once, everyone had access at the same time.
The concern was what would happen next.
The desert has often been late to adopting new technologies in meaningful ways — not because the tools are unavailable, but because institutions, businesses and communities take longer to understand how to use them. Sat did not want AI to follow the same pattern.
So throughout 2023, he tried to convince local cities and regional organizations to approach AI collectively: learn together, experiment together and avoid falling behind one organization at a time.
It never really took.
In 2024, he changed tactics and started writing instead — documenting AI through the lens of the Coachella Valley and trying to make an unfamiliar technology useful and understandable locally.
In 2025, the writing became rooms.
Beginning that April, Sat started running hands-on AI workshops at the CSUSB Palm Desert Entrepreneurial Resource Center. Those sessions became AI Coachella Valley.
Since then, AICV has run 42 sessions across 6 series, become an official affiliate of the ERC, launched AI Tinkerers Coachella Valley — the region's chapter of the global AI builders' community — and begun The AI Beat, grant-funded regional reporting on how artificial intelligence is changing the Inland Empire.
Sat spoke at TEDx Rancho Mirage in August 2025. He works from a resident office at the ERC in Palm Desert and a home studio in Rancho Mirage.
The founders' studio is still the idea. A physical place in the desert where founders, builders and curious people come to make things.
AI Coachella Valley is the work of making sure that, when that room finally exists, the region is ready for it.