We evaluate the leading-order hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to
the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon with two light flavors in minimal
hard-wall and soft-wall holographic QCD models, as well as in simple
generalizations thereof, and compare with the rather precise results available
from dispersive and lattice approaches. While holographic QCD cannot be
expected to shed light on the existing small discrepancies between the latter,
this comparison in turn provides useful information on the holographic models,
which have been used to evaluate hadronic light-by-light contributions where
errors in data-driven and lattice approaches are more sizable. In particular,
in the hard-wall model that has recently been used to implement the
Melnikov-Vainshtein short-distance constraint on hadronic light-by-light
contributions, a matching of the hadronic vacuum polarization to the
data-driven approach points to the same correction of parameters that has been
proposed recently in order to account for next-to-leading order effects.Comment: REVTEX, 18 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables; v2: references adde