  It depends: While we find within holography that the lifetime of the magnetic
field for collider energies like the ones achieved at RHIC is long enough to
build up the chiral magnetic current, the lifetime of the magnetic field at LHC
seems to be too short. We study the real time evolution of the chiral magnetic
effect out-of-equilibrium in strongly coupled holographic gauge theories. We
consider the backreaction of the magnetic field onto the geometry and monitor
pressure and chiral magnetic current. Our findings show that generically at
small magnetic field the pressure builds up faster than the chiral magnetic
current whereas at strong magnetic field the opposite is true. At large charge
we also find that equilibration is delayed significantly due to long lived
oscillations. We also match the parameters of our model to QCD parameters and
draw lessons of possible relevance to the realization of the chiral magnetic
effect in heavy ion collisions. In particular, we find an equilibration time of
about $\sim0.35$ fm/c in presence of the chiral anomaly for plasma temperatures
of order $T\sim300-400$ MeV.
