And it requires a leap of faith, just like other religions.
Partial disagreement. There are two varieties of atheism, strong and weak. Strong atheism positively asserts that there are no Gods. This is indeed a leap of faith.
Weak atheism, on the other hand, is the case in which a person does not believe in the existence of any deities but does not explicitly assert that there are none. This is not a leap of a faith, but instead a lack of it.
Takes a very huge leap of faith. Because who has explored the entire universe to prove that God exists nowhere? On the other hand, we can look around the universe and have a pretty-high level of confidence that He does exist.