All those are regional monopolies by law or by fact. You cannot move land, so land prices will always be regional. Energy and water networks are local monopolies, usually owned by the municipality or a local company monopoly. With electricity, you might have some choice, that is, you rent the power line from the local monopoly and buy the electricity from one of several companies. However, the choice is limited to companies serving your area, and the exact rules and companies strongly differ between European nations.

I would assume land costs are higher in NL, as there is less (I don't think Tesla paid a lot for the land) water in Germany depends on the region (but even Tesla in a dry region seems to do fine, although there are protests), there is more water in the south and less in the north, but again more near the coast (where I live), Netherlands has 26% corporate tax, Germany has 23% to 32% corporate tax, depending where you are (federalist state, some portion is determined by municipalities).

Energy prices are currently high b/c a lot is produced by gas powered plants, but as Germany peaked renewables at 82% lately, and new renewables are very cheap (there are solar plants popping up everywhere here), energy should not be a problem (chip production is not aluminium or fertilizer production).

The main reason TSMC builds there is that there are already lots of chip makers and knowledgeable staff to hire (and state subsidies, which if correctly used can be a good thing, Bavaria made the transition from an agricultural country to a high tech country with state subsidies, money transfers from the richer states in Germany to Bavaria - of course if used badly are just lost without effect).

> As a dumb American

This is one of the most annoying openings to a sentence you could device, just fyi

As to the why. (With the premise that the comment you're replying to is overstating it)

An open border is pretty irrelevant to all of the above, more relevant is that both are in the EU. So you can somewhat imagine them as US states on steroids. They set their own taxes with a large degree of freedom, devise their own policies with a large degree of freedom etc

- energy costs are a factor of market price and taxes, the electricity market is the same but taxes on energy can impact differently - land costs are fully dependent on factors that have nothing to do with open borders or the EU, just local/national taxes and zoning etc - water supply depends on the geography/geology of the area. I don't know if they're that different but I don't see why they couldn't be

Each country has their own energy and water providers, land taxes, etc.

There are a bunch of regulations on how companies can operate in the economic block, but it's still a bunch of sovereign countries there.

All of those vary significantly between US states too.