In the first part of the talk, we examine a class of gravity backgrounds obtained by considering the backreaction of a spatially uniform density of mutually BPS Wilson lines or heavy quarks in N = 4 SUSY Yang-Mills theory. They are obtained by considering the 1/4-BPS geometries associated to smeared string/D3-brane intersections. We argue that for the (partially) localized intersection, the geometry exhibits a flow from AdS in the UV to a novel IR scaling solution displaying anisotropic Lifshitz-like scaling, hyperscaling violation and a logarithmic running dilaton. We then argue that this type of flows to an IR theory with scaling properties is prevalent in holographic gauge theories at finite density.