  We discuss how a dominant tetraquark component of the lightest scalar mesons
may emerge in AdS/QCD gravity duals. In particular, we show that the
exceptionally strong binding required to render the tetraquark ground state
lighter than the lowest-lying scalar quark-antiquark nonet can be
holographically encoded into bulk-mass corrections for the tetraquark's dual
mode. The latter are argued to originate from the anomalous dimension of the
corresponding four-quark interpolator. To provide a concrete example, we
implement this mechanism into the dilaton soft-wall dual for holographic QCD.
Preventing the lowest-lying dual mode from collapsing into the AdS boundary
then establishes a rather generic lower bound on the tetraquark mass (which may
be overcome in the presence of additional background fields). We further
demonstrate that the higher tetraquark excitations can become heavier than
their quark-antiquark counterparts and are thus likely to dissolve into the
multiparticle continuum.
