Angular $http service returns empty string for large JSON response

A data intensive intranet application uses the following angularjs post function. It calls a Web API service returning a large JSON object in a chunked stream. This works perfectly well for responses of 100Mb but fails when the response reaches about 250 Mb.

$scope.refresh = function (){
        usSpinnerService.spin("main-grid");
        $http.post('/api/Assets/GetLargeJSONResult', $scope.postPayload
            ).then(
                function successCallback(response) {
                    $scope.mainGridOptions.api.setRowData(response.data);
                    $scope.mainGridOptions.api.refreshView();
                    clearErrorMessage();
            },
            httpErrorCallback)
            .then(refreshGridTwo)
            .finally(function () {
                usSpinnerService.stop("main-grid");
            });
};

Putting a breakpoint on the line $scope.mainGridOptions.api.setRowData(response.data); shows that response.data is an empty string.

Everything else works fine. I've tried various different ways of returning the JSON response from the web server and so I doubt the problem is on the server end. I'm targeting the Chrome browser in Windows.

Relevant request headers:

• Accept: application/json, text/plain, /
• Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
• Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
• Connection: keep-alive

Relevant response headers

• HTTP/1.1 200 OK
• Cache-Control: no-cache
• Transfer-Encoding: chunked
• Content-Type: application/json
• Expires: -1

I know one option would be to page the response into smaller chunks. However, I would prefer to keep the data intact as it's being analysed in a grid. I wondered if I'm missing something as I can successfully stream very large open office xml files (media type "application/octet-stream") to the browser from Web API without any issues.