We introduce what is meant by an AC-Gorenstein ring. It is a generalized notion of Gorenstein ring which is compatible with the Gorenstein AC-injective and Gorenstein AC-projective modules of Bravo-Gillespie-Hovey. It is also compatible with the notion of $n$-coherent rings introduced by Bravo-Perez: So a $0$-coherent AC-Gorenstein ring is precisely a usual Gorenstein ring in the sense of Iwanaga, while a $1$-coherent AC-Gorenstein ring is precisely a Ding-Chen ring. We show that any AC-Gorenstein ring admits a stable module category that is compactly generated and is the homotopy category of two Quillen equivalent abelian model category structures. One is projective with cofibrant objects the Gorenstein AC-projective modules while the other is an injective model structure with fibrant objects the Gorenstein AC-injectives.