The mining of several critical raw materials – including the so-called ‘conflict minerals’ associated witharmed conflict and human rights abuses – and their combination, refining and use in many newadvanced electronic products, are providing an important material infrastructure to currenttechnological progress. Relying on text analysis of USPTO patent data between 1976 and 2017, ourexplorative study provides a methodological and empirical starting point for exploring thetechnological and geographical linkages between technological paradigms and selected critical andconflict materials (CCMs). Our descriptive analysis finds evidence of a clear association between ICTtechnologies and CCM intensity over time, and of a striking resource-technology divide in global ICTvalue chains between value creating and value extracting activities across Global North and GlobalSouth and their regions. The paper intends to emphasize the need for a more critical, spatially sensitiveapproach to studying resource-based technological change to expose the uneven developmentconsequences created, sustained, or mitigated by technological progress