Expanding to multiple EU states is a requirement to satisfy the various governments if you are getting public EU funding. See Airbus for an example.

The difference is that Airbus didn't as much build new factories (and certainly not several at the same time) as it is a consortium (and later a unified company) of formerly independent European aerospace companies. E. g. their current German plants, Hamburg (commercial aircraft) and Donauwörth (helicopters) used to belong to MBB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt-B%C3%B6lkow-Bloh...) and then DASA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASA). That's a consolidation similar to what happened in the US, albeit maybe with more "state interference".